«A historic theatre never stops living». Restorer Bevilacqua on the Comunale’s building site

«A historic theatre never stops living». Restorer Bevilacqua on the Comunale’s building site

Photographs by Ivano Adversi

212 days to 14 February 2027, the date on which Teatro Comunale di Bologna will open its doors again. On the scaffolding that fills the Sala Bibiena today, the conservation and maintenance of the surfaces advances centimetre by centimetre, led by Fabio Bevilacqua, conservator of cultural heritage and operations director of the works, who drew up the project together with the architect Francesco Dalmastri.

«A theatre is fundamentally a place that is lived in — Bevilacqua explains —: people inhabit it, they use it. And use is bound up with the damage the surfaces suffer». Forty-six years of performances, of audiences, of lights and sets have left their mark on the finishes that came out of the great building site of 1980-81, when the theatre — declared unusable because of serious structural problems — was consolidated and made safe. The urgency of the moment meant that many conservation and decorative works had to be postponed: on the nineteenth-century ceiling, for instance, the work was limited to a general cleaning and the filling of detachments, deferring a thorough restoration that was never carried out. That season did leave a precious legacy, though: the documentation of the execution techniques and of the recipes for the historic finishes, a body of knowledge that today proves crucial in defining the method and the approach of the new restoration.

«The project is tied to maintenance work that sets out to resolve the conservation problems of the surfaces — Bevilacqua continues —. Here we have both painted surfaces and stucco surfaces finished with gilding». At the centre of it is the ceiling: «It is the part that carries the figurative information, that gives the general sense of the decorative scheme». Cleaning away dust, sediment and the successive interventions of the past will give the painted ceiling back its depth and legibility: «There will certainly be a change in colour». Nothing drastic, however: the guiding principle of the project is not to chase a hypothetical eighteenth-century face for the hall, but to recognise the value of its layered image, built up over two and a half centuries of works and transformations.

In the end, Bevilacqua’s gaze goes beyond the scaffolding: «I believe the restoration will renew the city of Bologna’s “own” monument and give it back». From his words it is clear that to restore is to take care of something that belongs to everyone. The Comunale is closed, but a historic theatre never stops living, not even when it stands still