Le Muse Theater Ancona

Built in 1827 from a design by Pietro Ghinelli, neoclassical in style, with a typical horseshoe shaped room and four seating sectors, Le Muse theatre in Ancona is to reopen on 13th October of this year as a new piece of architecture with a history brimming with evocative juxtapositions. Maestro Riccardo Muti will be conducting the inauguration concert.
The neo-classical façade of the theatre remains intact and links to the history of Le Muse theatre, while the new project has completely redesigned the insides in the form of a large piazza, both in the materials and shapes. The theatre of the city of Ancona features a hall of over one thousand seats, a stage of almost 400 square metres, a fireproof curtain that is the only one of its kind in Europe (designed by the sculpture Valeriano Trubbiani), a smaller theatre of 186 seats, as well as ultra-modern facilities and spaces for the artists and the public.
With the addition of two reinforced concrete pillars, a project dating back to the Nineteen Seventies blotted out the original image of Le Muse and permanently separated the external theatre casing from its dull interior architecture. From here in, the new design by the two architects Danilo Guerri and Paola Salmoni "restored" a complementary rapport between the modern interior and the neoclassical façades, preserving as much as they could (the entrance staircase, the original lobby) and creating a certain degree of continuity with the external urban setting, where emphasis was placed on the most public places in the theatre (lobby, foyer, reception rooms). The result is a theatre-plaza featuring materials that recapture the nomadic and temporary spirit inherent of a "performance" (wood and metal, trellises and galleries) as well as the spirit of the urban monument (bricks and stones, rhetorical shapes and collective meanings).
With its rehearsal rooms, reception rooms and acoustics researched in Tokyo and Bologna, Le Muse theatre is the biggest in the Marche, a special region as far as theatres are concerned, housing 78 theatres currently in use (and another forty to be reopened) for a population of a million and a half inhabitants. The new Le Muse Theatre is one of the most modern cutting-edge playhouses in central Italy.