In 1808 nine families of an Umbrian village of a few hundred inhabitants decided to build themselves a theatre. Not a hall: a real Italian-style theatre, with stalls, two tiers of boxes, a stage and a painted curtain, all at reduced scale. What came out was a house with ninety-nine seats, and it is the smallest historic Italian-style theatre in the world.
What to see
You go in and you smile, because everything is real but tiny: the boxes are just deep enough for two chairs, the stalls have a few rows, the stage is a few metres wide. The painted decoration, with putti, garlands and pastel colours, was done at the end of the nineteenth century and has been restored.
The name, Concordia, comes from the spirit in which the families joined together, in years when the ideas of the French Revolution were circulating even in villages. The theatre has a regular season: plays are really performed, and for the audience there are fewer than a hundred seats to book.
Visiting
The theatre is at Monte Castello di Vibio, in the province of Perugia, forty minutes by car from Perugia and from Todi; it is visited on guided tours at set times, with a ticket. Half an hour.
Our editors' tip
If you find a performance in the programme, book it: watching a play in a house of ninety-nine seats is different from any large theatre, because the actors see everyone's face and the audience hears the breathing of those on stage. It is the reason this theatre still exists.