Sixty local families clubbed together to build it, almost all of them enriched by the sea: these were the years when Camogli owned more than a third of the Italian fleet. Each bought a box — they were the palchettisti — and with that money the town gave itself an Italian-style theatre designed by the architects Salvatore and Nicolò Bruno, who had already built the Teatro Gustavo Modena in Sampierdarena. Construction ran from 1874 to 1876 and the opening night was on 30 September 1876, with Giuseppe Verdi's Ernani.
What to see
The auditorium is horseshoe-shaped in the Italian manner, with four tiers of boxes and a gallery. It originally held about a thousand people; today, after safety upgrades and wider seats, it holds 499, and you feel the difference: you sit in comfort inside a shell built for twice the crowd. Outside, the building follows the late nineteenth-century Renaissance-revival idiom of Ligurian architecture, with raised stucco work and geometric fresco patterns across the facades.
In the nineteen-thirties a first overhaul replaced the timber structures that had rotted over the decades, dug the orchestra pit and added two proscenium boxes; the reopening, on 30 November 1933, was with Gioachino Rossini's The Barber of Seville, in the presence of Prince Umberto of Savoy, whose name the theatre bore until the end of the monarchy. The second restoration, between 2010 and 2016 to a design by the engineer Nicola Berlucchi, remade the stage, the stalls, the proscenium arch, the ceiling, the friezes and the stucco, with Lares among the contractors, the same firm that worked on the Teatro La Fenice in Venice. In the foyer an inscription from those same years came to light bearing a dedication to the regime: in 1945 the liberation mayor Mario De Barbieri had it erased, leaving only a few words standing, “in quest'era di rinascita italica”.
Visiting
The theatre faces piazza Matteotti, which people in Camogli simply call the theatre square. It was not there at first: until the early twentieth century the only access was a narrow passage along the railway, and the level ground was created by filling the hollow of the rio Gentile with spoil from the second Portofino railway tunnel. The cedars of Lebanon in the gardens and the war memorial, unveiled in 1922, date from those years. Declared part of the national artistic heritage in 1996, the theatre reopened on 23 December 2016 and has run a regular season since, including the Festival Govi devoted to Gilberto Govi.
Our editors' tip
Buy a seat in a box rather than in the stalls: in a hall of 499 seats it costs little more, the view is good, and from inside you understand how the box-holder system that paid for the building actually worked. And get there twenty minutes early, long enough to hunt down in the foyer the inscription mutilated by mayor De Barbieri: it is the piece of this theatre nobody points at, and it is worth the trip.