Teatro Eleonora Duse

The great hall of Asolo's castle has been a theatre since 1798, and the theatre it houses today carries the name of the town's most famous resident, Eleonora Duse. Its strangest story is invisible from the auditorium: the previous nineteenth-century playhouse was dismantled, sold to a Venetian antiquarian and rebuilt in Florida, where it still stands.

Why it matters

This is theatre history in nested layers. A provincial town of a few thousand people has kept a playhouse continuously on one site since the Venetian republic's final years — first in a converted castle hall, then in a box-holders' wooden theatre, then in the 1932 hall named for Duse. Each layer left evidence: the fresco fragments exposed when the plaster came off, the jails that once sounded beneath the stalls, the wooden boxes that emigrated to Sarasota. The theatre forms part of Asolo's history and remains a performance venue.

What to notice

The theatre's plain entrance is in the castle complex, which also contains the Civic Tower. The 1990 restoration gave the hall a raw-wood auditorium that acknowledges the site's wooden-theatre past without imitating it. The theatre occupies the castle's former council hall — the room where the Venetian podestà held court — so the walls around the auditorium are genuinely medieval and Renaissance, whatever the seating is not. Municipal records list 341 seats. Sixteenth-century fresco fragments emerged during the 1930s rebuilding.

Context and history

The theatre in Asolo began unofficially: a document of 1795 reports a stage operating without public permission in the Palazzo Pretorio. Three years later the architect Antonio Locatelli was commissioned to build a proper theatre in the castle's hall, inaugurated on the evening of 20 November 1798. The nineteenth century rebuilt it around a society of box-holders: engineer Francesco Martignago's theatre of 1855-1857 offered a stage and three tiers of wooden boxes for roughly 180 spectators on the castle's first floor. Safety then fought pleasure for decades — the district jails beneath the auditorium forced closure in 1878, an inspection condemned the structure in 1881, and reopening followed in 1884. Declared unusable in 1927, the wooden theatre was bought by the commune, and in 1931 it was sold to the antiquarian Loewi of Venice: dismantled, shipped and re-erected, it is now displayed at the Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Florida. The demolition revealed sixteenth-century fresco fragments behind the plaster, and architect Forlati's project turned the space into the new hall inaugurated in spring 1932 and dedicated to Eleonora Duse, who had died in 1924 and chosen burial in the town's little cemetery. A restoration in 1990 created today's flexible auditorium.