The annual Festival of the Aegean takes place at the Apollo Municipal Theater, aka "La Piccola Scala" (it was modeled on the Milanese landmark, although other influences are clear as well), in Hermoupolis, the main town of the island of Syros. The building was constructed in 1862-1864 (architect P. Sampo) by a share company and accommodated the first theatrical performance, La Favorita by Gaetano Donizetti, on October 3, 1864.

The theater was the "home" for hundreds of resident Italians who came for months each summer from Venice and Milano on their way to the Far East. Syros was the midpoint. After the theater was built more and more Italians would stay longer and longer on this beautiful island, and opera performances occurred each summer—Tosca, Il Trovatore, La Boheme, to name a few. Theatrical productions and recitals aso occurred from the 1850s to the early 1900s.

The Italian residents, in the early 1900s, departed the island never to reutrn. The theater was then taken over by the resident Greeks who turned it into a movie house until the early 1960s, after which time it was closed for some forty years until the renovation was concluded in the late 1990s.

The theater was badly damaged by an air raid bombing in 1944 and subsequently fell into disuse. Further, it was to become a target for the military junta who took power in Greece two decades later. With philistine zeal, they determined to eradicate any foreign influence, removing paintings, original boxes and galleries, leaving the theater in a sorry state. Reconstruction work began in the 1980s, and the theater was reopened in July 2000: The velvet seats are back, the ceiling paintings are impressive, and with them a sense of grandeur has returned. Today four levels of boxes oversee the wooden stage with a width of 18 meters, depth of 9 meters.

The first opera performance in the Apollo—after a hundred years of no opera performances—was Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia, produced by the Festival of the Aegean, Peter Tiboris conductor, on July 14 2005.

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