Teatro La Fenice

Teatro La Fenice has earned its phoenix name honestly: inaugurated in 1792 to Giannantonio Selva's neoclassical design and burned in 1836, it was destroyed by arson in 1996 and rose again as it was, where it was.

Why it matters

Venice's theatres were so numerous that a sumptuary law capped them at seven, and when the ageing Teatro San Benedetto was lost to its owners, the Nobile Società commissioned a replacement that had to outshine them all. The official history records that the competition notice was published on 1 November 1789, requiring five tiers of boxes with at least thirty-five boxes per tier; twenty-eight entries arrived, nine with models. The jury's prize went to Pietro Bianchi, but the commission went to the young Giannantonio Selva, whose neoclassical design — the only competition model to survive — still shapes the building today. Construction ran from April 1790, when demolitions were supervised by Antonio Solari, to April 1792, and on 16 May 1792, the day of the Festa della Sensa, the theatre opened with Alessandro Pepoli's "I giochi d'Agrigento".

What to notice

The Sale Apollinee are ceremonial halls reached by the honour staircase from the atrium, where stucco and gilded rooms carry the theatre's history from its origins to the present; the halls were severely damaged in the 1996 fire and were returned through a combination of conservation of surviving parts and philological reconstruction in traditional materials. The rebuilding followed the motto "com'era, dov'era" — as it was, where it was — the same principle applied after the collapse of the San Marco bell tower, so the auditorium keeps Selva's curved form even where the fabric is new. Look for the permanent exhibition on Maria Callas and her Venetian years, a reminder that mid-twentieth-century operatic history unfolded in this room. The under-roof space, once a scene-painting workshop, now serves as an exhibition hall with exposed wooden trusses, an addition from the latest reconstruction.

Context and history

Each catastrophe refined the theatre rather than ending it. The deeper wound came on 29 January 1996, when the official account records a devastating arson attack that destroyed the theatre. Rossi, who died in 1997, devised the reconstruction as a portrait of the theatre rather than a pastiche; after contractual upheavals, a new consortium took the site over in October 2001, some three hundred workers laboured across five parallel sites, and the theatre was handed over on 8 December 2003. Riccardo Muti opened the inaugural week on 14 December 2003 with Beethoven's "La consacrazione della casa", and the full company returned in November 2004 with "La traviata", which had premiered here.