Teatro dei Vigilanti 'R. Cioni'

Few playhouses owe their existence to an emperor's exile. In 1814 Napoleon had Portoferraio's deconsecrated Carmine church converted into a theatre, inaugurated while he still ruled the island. Its Apollo curtain survives, and since 2015 the building has honoured the Elban tenor Renato Cioni.

Why it matters

The Teatro dei Vigilanti compresses four centuries of Portoferraio's history into one building: a seventeenth-century chapel, the church of Carmine, a Napoleonic playhouse, a cinema and now the island's working stage. Napoleon proposed converting the deconsecrated church into a theatre in 1814; the hall opened on 24 January 1815 in the presence of his mother and sister. Today it hosts theatre and music events.

What to notice

The hall has a horseshoe form, with tiers of boxes around the stalls. Side columns from the earlier church survive within the walls, and its apse lies beneath the stage. The curtain, painted in tempera by Vincenzo Antonio Revelli, shows the emperor as Apollo tending the herds of Admetus, king of Thessaly. The subject draws a parallel between Apollo's exile and Napoleon's time on Elba. During the Second World War, residents removed the curtain for safekeeping; the Soprintendenza di Pisa later restored it. An exhibition on the theatre's history opened in 2025, with panels and archive film.

Context and history

The site began as a funerary chapel founded in 1617 by Orazio Borbone, Marchese di Sorbello. In 1714 Governor Girolamo Piccolini replaced it with the Chiesa del Carmine, completed in 1718 on a Greek-cross plan. The church was deconsecrated in the early nineteenth century and used as a military warehouse before Napoleon's conversion of the building.

After Napoleon's fall, the theatre passed to the Accademia dei Fortunati, which in 1819 took the name Accademia dei Vigilanti. Its nineteenth-century seasons of prose, opera and dance gave way to decline. The hall later served as a cinema until the early 1950s. The Comune di Portoferraio bought it in 1974 and restored it in a campaign completed in the 1990s. Further work in 2023 uncovered wall paintings of probable Napoleonic date in the boxes and restored gilded cornices and the roof rose window. In 2015 the commune dedicated the theatre to Renato Cioni, the Portoferraio-born tenor who had died the previous year.