This theatre was born almost without walls. The only part built in masonry was the stage tower; the rest was an idea drawn on the lawn, inside the amusement park of the spa. It opened in 1930 with Aida, which says a good deal about the ambitions of a town that in those years thought of itself as a drawing room of Europe.
What to see
The design is by Lodovico Fortini, late twenties. The stage tower has all the fittings of a nineteenth-century opera stage, with service galleries and dressing rooms backstage; the hall, on the other hand, reproduced in the open air the horseshoe plan of Italian opera houses, divided into three sectors, the first two slightly sunk and raked, the third wide and joined to the level of the garden.
Until the forties it was used mostly for opera, then also as a cinema. In 1981 a refit covered the stalls with a fixed tensile roof and remade stage and services: the open-air theatre stopped being open-air. In the eighties the state broadcaster used it as a studio for some programmes.
Visiting
The theatre is inside the spa park, in the centre of Montecatini; you go in for performances, and the programme is concentrated in the warm season. An evening.
Our editors' tip
Walk round the building and look at the stage tower from outside, standing alone against the sky. It is the only real piece of this theatre: everything else, for half a century, was a lawn, some chairs and a plan drawn on the ground. Few buildings show so clearly what a theatre is actually made of.