The Teatro popolare Samonà is Sciacca's theatre designed by Giuseppe and Alberto Samonà. The idea arose in the early nineteen-seventies, after the old Politeama Mariano Rossi had been demolished in 1951 to make way for the bus station car park. In 1973 the Samonàs presented the outline design together with the detailed plan for the Cammordino district; work officially began in 1979, but after three years the site stopped and, despite a restart in 1988, the theatre remained unfinished for a long time. It was inaugurated on 23 May 2015, still incomplete.
What to see
The building is a composition of three solids side by side: a rectangular block holding the stage and the performers' facilities, an inclined truncated cone and a half-pyramid, which house the two auditoriums, seating 980 and 230. Around the body of the theatre, stairs, canopies and exits were meant, in the designers' view, to bind it to the fabric of the town.
On the short sides of the block and on the half-pyramid are iron decorations of an eye, an ear and a bucranium, made by Alberto Samonà with the Sciacca craftsman Giuseppe Bentivegna. Beside the entrance to the main hall stands a white marble stele, the «unity of the arts», bearing Ben Shahn's drawing of «two clasping hands» and, on the other side, the plan of the theatre.
Visiting
Programme and opening times should be checked with the town council or the bodies running the theatre.
Our editors' tip
In 2009 the director Werner Herzog proposed staging Wagner's Ring cycle here and blowing up the theatre at the end of Twilight of the Gods: the idea was judged unfeasible, because bringing down that mass of reinforced concrete would have needed so much explosive that it would have put the town at risk.
