Domenico Ferri was an Italian architect and stage designer. Ferri is considered, along with Basoli, to be the most celebrated Bologna stage designer of the 19th century. In the early 1930s he established himself in Paris at the Théatre Italien and collaborated on the staging of operas by Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti and Verdi.

Domenico Ferri, a native of Selva Malvezzi, in the province of Bologna. His birth certificate shows that his godfather was the then Governor of Selva, Giuseppe Gianini, it must be inferred that the Ferri family, which counted among its members farmers and even a priest, must have been quite important in a nineteenth-century context of the rural areas of the province of Bologna.

He attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, training at the school of Francesco Cocchi and Antonio Basoli.

He made his debut as a set designer, producing sets for several theaters both in Emilia-Romagna and in Rome, Ancona, Padua, and Senigallia in the decade from 1819 to 1829.

For his work, Domenico Ferri traveled extensively throughout Europe. In 1837 he executed designs for the sets of several operas at the Italian Opera House in Paris, a city in which he worked for a long time. In 1847 he was to be the author, together with his pupil Luigi Verardi, of the ceiling and curtain decoration for London's Covent Garden. Recalled by Gioachino Rossini to Paris in 1850 he renewed the triumphs of the Italian set designers of the 17th and 18th centuries.

From 1854 he passed into the service of the Savoy family. Called by Charles Albert to teach at the Turin Academy, he executed many works in this city, taking care of decorations and restorations at the Castle of Moncalieri, Palazzo Carignano, the Valentino or even the grand staircase of the Royal Palace. As an artist of the Savoy court in 1860 he followed in Bologna the adaptation of the royal apartments in the suburban villa of San Michele in Bosco.

He also carried out some projects in Moscow, particularly in the Kremlin.