CAOS - Centro Arti Opificio Siri

CAOS is Terni's answer to the question every industrial city eventually asks: what to do with the factory when the factory closes. Inside the former Siri chemical works, 5,600 square metres now hold a modern and contemporary art museum, the city's archaeological collection, temporary exhibitions, a theatre and artist studios under one raw brick roof.

Why it matters

The building is as much an exhibit as anything in it. From 1793 the site carried a papal ironworks, by national unification the largest factory in Umbria; after its closure the yards turned to mechanical and chemical production, and from 1925 Luigi Casale's Siri company made synthetic ammonia here. When the chemical works finally shut in 1983, the municipality spent two decades buying and restoring the complex, and CAOS opened in 2009 as a cultural centre, bringing art and archaeology into the restored industrial complex. For travellers, it is the single place where Terni's art, archaeology and industrial history meet.

What to notice

The modern and contemporary art museum carries Aurelio De Felice's name and preserves works by the sculptor from Torre Orsina and his twentieth-century contemporaries. The Museo Archeologico Claudia Giontella gathers Terni's Roman material, including the original inscription from the nearby amphitheatre. Then look at the building itself: the municipal portal describes the conversion under the motto from chemical factory to factory of culture, and the spaces keep factory scale — big sheds, gantry proportions, raw structure — against which the contemporary shows are staged.

Context and history

The layers accumulate quickly. The papal ironworks of 1793 made the site the industrial heavyweight of pre-unification Umbria, with around two hundred workers on twelve thousand square metres; it closed in 1905, and from 1910 the plant shifted to mechanical and chemical work with military applications. In 1925 Luigi Casale founded Siri, the Società Italiana Ricerche Industriali, to produce synthetic ammonia by his own process, and the works ran through the war and post-war decades before production and employment declined and the plant closed for good in 1983. The municipality acquired the site between 1997 and 2002, restored what could be saved, and opened CAOS there in 2009. The Ministry of Culture's contemporary-arts register now lists the complex among Italy's recognized venues for the arts, a trajectory from ammonia to art that mirrors Terni's own passage from heavy industry to a post-industrial identity.