Originally, it was a wooden theater built in 1776 by the Marquise Alli-Maccarani in the former dwelling house of the King of Sardinia.

  The place was then razed by the city of Nice and replaced by an Italian-style opera house. Following a fire in 1881, it gave way to the new Opéra de Nice theater, inaugurated in 1885 with Giuseppe Verdi's "Aïda", a work reprogrammed 120 years later to commemorate its beginnings.

In the Second Empire style, the building is made of metal beams inspired by the work of Gustave Eiffel, while its ceiling depicts the Char du Soleil painted by Emmanuel Costa.

Every year it hosts around a hundred performances that alternate neglected works, contemporary or old, and classics.