Teatro Romano

Tucked against the wing of Palazzo Reale, a few steps from Porta Palatina, lie the brick walls of the theatre that entertained Roman Turin. Built soon after the colony's founding, enlarged under the Flavians, and buried for fifteen centuries, the ruins of Augusta Taurinorum's theatre lie open to the sky in the heart of the city.

Why it matters

Roman theatres served as civic gathering places in the colonies. The theatre of Augusta Taurinorum, the Roman name of Turin, occupied the whole of the city block at the north-eastern angle of the walls, cut diagonally into the corner of the fortifications. The remains preserve successive phases of the building: the semicircular cavea of the first theatre, the Flavian rebuilding with its enlarged curved facade, the quarried-out shell of late antiquity, and the rediscovery of 1899 when the structure came to light during work on Palazzo Reale's new wing.

What to notice

• The mixed construction of the cavea wall: courses of river pebbles alternating with regular rows of brick, the signature of early Roman building in the Po plain.
• The diagonal cut of the block: the theatre was wedged into the angled north-east corner of the city walls, so the curved seating and the straight fortification meet at sharp angles.
• Remains of the scene wall, originally articulated by three doors and flanked by side annexes, in front of which the stage stood.
• The area of the quadriportico behind the stage was expanded in the second phase; a painted plaster fragment, recorded in a 1900 watercolour, hints at its lost decoration.
• A stretch of the cavea wall is preserved in the basement of Palazzo Reale's modern wing.

Context and history

Within roughly a generation of the colony's founding, as the first century BC gave way to the first century AD, the first theatre went up: a semicircular cavea, a scene building with three doors, and behind it a rectangular portico, its masonry part finished off in timber. Around half a century later, a radical renewal replaced the movable fittings with fixed masonry and enclosed the whole rear of the building in a large quadriportico up to the city wall; this phase may have been financed by the wealthy Cozii family, governors of the Alpine region. Under the Flavians, between about 70 and 90 AD, the theatre was entirely rebuilt again: the seating grew by an outer order, and a curvilinear facade replaced the old straight one. The building served for over two centuries, until the rise of Christianity brought performance to an end; by the late fourth century the abandoned theatre was already being quarried for material to build the first cathedral — dated by the fact that a cathedral stood in Turin by 398, hosting a synod of bishops. Buried and forgotten, the theatre re-emerged in 1899 during construction of the new Manica wing of Palazzo Reale, and after long debate its remains were conserved where they lay.