The first news about the existence in Cesena of places intended for theatrical performances dates back to the year 1503, when a hall was arranged on the occasion with the comedy Filettolo and his lover Lisbena in the Palazzo dei Conservatori, and in 1560 with a comedy in Palazzo Alidosi later called Spada. This last hall, used for shows, continued to be used even in the eighteenth century because in a chronicle note it is said that on May 15, 1783, by order of the Marquis Spada, the theater was ‘dismantled’ (Zanotti, map 68 reverse). He freed himself from the commitment he had apparently undertaken because in the same year 1783, the marquis announced that he was no longer able to maintain the theater alone for financial reasons (The theater … Bonci p. 30). Ten years later, a 1793 guide recalls, speaking of Cesena Beautiful city […] there are […] a castle, a theater (Boccolari 1793, p. 87), showing that perhaps the Palazzo Spada theater had already become recognizable in the urban fabric, certainly a designated and public place – if not a real theater. In fact, it had become customary to open Palazzo Spada as a theater and in 1796 it was thought to build a stable structure there. (Raggi 1906, p. 7). On May 4, 1796, Marquis Francesco Spada of Bologna agreed to lease the property with a twenty-year rental contract, thus solving the financial problems for a theatrical Delegation. This had appointed the architect Lorenzo Caporali to draw up the project which was realized by Giuseppe Sangiorgi. The theater, not very beautiful and made of wood, was built on the noble floor of the Palace: it occupied the second, third, and fourth floors (Encyclopedia, p. 459) and had twenty-one boxes distributed over three tiers. It was inaugurated during the French domination on May 13, 1797, with the comic opera La donna volubile. But it did not meet general satisfaction because it had to be accessed by a narrow and poorly protected staircase (p. 7) that caused repeated incidents. It was renewed when the palace was purchased on May 5, 1829, by the Marquis Guidi who had long acquired it from Marquis Spada for speculation purposes. On that occasion, the theater took the name Teatro Comunale Spada. In 1838 the City Council decreed the construction of a new theater building to be erected in place of the old Spada theater which continued to host shows until August 1843, when, having already begun to demolish it, no show was held. In the Carnival of 1843-44, the tiny Masini opened, with a semi-serious opera… (Trovanelli 1896). The architect Vincenzo Ghinelli (to whom the theaters of Senigallia and Camerino also owe) designed the project with four tiers as requested by the Municipality but during construction, they preferred to build five. The theater structure adopted highly rational technical and distributive solutions. In 1843, the demolition work began not only on Palazzo Spada but also on other houses and buildings in the immediate vicinity. The theater interior was decorated with monochromes and golden arabesques and four roundels depicting the Muses by the painter Francesco Migliari from Ferrara. The work ended after eight years, in 1846, when the theater was inaugurated with the performance of Donizetti’s Maria di Rohan. The neoclassical façade is porticoed and decorated with windows with bas-reliefs by Bernasconi of Bologna, marked by eight Ionic half-columns. The façade is crowned by a pediment with the municipal coat of arms with the motto Jacta est alea and the figures of the Savio and Rubicon rivers. From the atrium, one enters the hall and the casino located on the second floor. The hall, with a horseshoe shape, has four tiers and a gallery: the balconies are covered with shiny Venetian stucco. Considering that once standing places were also sold and that up to 400 people entered the gallery alone, the theater could accommodate more than 1400 spectators, increasing to 1500 during Carnival balls. Indeed, theaters were once built with a capacity equal to one-tenth of the city’s population. The stage is quite large and equipped with services, with a very convenient door for bringing in scenery. The scenic equipment was painted by Pietro Venier from Verona while Antonio Pio decorated the curtain with Dante Alighieri led to the Temple of Glory, still in the theater but in poor conservation conditions. During the last restoration, the original second curtain by Antonio Liverani seems to have been found while Lucio Rossi’s is lost. The machinery with nineteenth-century grids and drums is largely preserved. The theater also preserves the machines for the sounds of lightning, hail, and thunder, which historic theaters are generally missing. Fifty years later, in 1897, the first restorations of the external and internal pictorial decorations were prepared. Some modifications made over time to the building, compared to the original layout, although numerous, have overall respected its primitive arrangement. In 1924, the proscenium was removed, the mystery gulf reduced, and the boxes on the fourth tier demolished. A consolidation intervention was carried out after World War II on the roofs, while in the 1970s a fireproof shutter was built. At the beginning of the 1980s, the theater was already dilapidated and, besides no longer adequately meeting the changed needs of citizens and safety regulations, showed structural failures, while decorations and furnishings urgently needed appropriate restoration. Therefore, from 1983, in several stages, a long and complex conservative restoration and safety upgrade was carried out, completed in 1995. In the 1983 work, the roof covering and supporting structures were reassembled, whose trusses, considerable in size (22 meters), required significant technical and executive effort due to their extreme state of decay. For the damaged wooden parts, epoxy resins and fiberglass bars were used. Funds were provided by the Emilia Romagna Region for the restoration of the Conservatory atrium, which has returned, as a Small Theater, to be part of the theatrical machine as a concert hall. This recovery allowed respecting the rational order with which these entrance environments to the performance hall were designed. In a small room, where the ticket office was located, a space, the Morellini Room, was created to host exhibitions of young contemporary artists and different displays. For the furnishings of the theater hall, which after the 1924–1928 modifications was red, a greenish-blue and pale blue upholstery was chosen, as it was originally. The old curtain, although excluded from today’s intervention plan, has been restored and will remain fixed in the background as a backdrop, unable to bear fireproof treatments; moreover, in 1999, alongside the historic curtain, one created by the Cesena artist Massimo Pulini was added, initially intended to hide the fireproof shutter. Pulini conceived a complex and harmonious iconography in architecture and symbols consisting of multiple elements with powerful evocative force. The images, with almost monochrome tones, follow one another almost blending. To the circular colonnade, with classical lines, is superimposed a basin from which Mercury emerges, while from the background emerges a large, calm, and pale masculine head. The old chandelier lost after the war was replaced with a Murano glass one. The new floors were made with Venetian terrazzo except in the boxes where terracotta was preferred. Respecting the hall’s acoustic box was made possible by creating the stalls’ flooring with wooden boards and appropriately raising it from the original beaten earth floor, which remained as it was originally. The work, directed by Riccardo Barbieri and his assistant Michele Casadei, both from the Technical Office of the Municipality of Cesena, was completed at the end of 1995. (Caterina Spada – Lidia Bortolotti)
Information about Alessandro Bonci Theater
Piazza Guidazzi,
47521 Cesena (Forlì-Cesena)
Source: MIBACT
