Teatro Aycardi, Finalborgo site features

The auditorium is the whole point and it is tiny. 250 places in twenty-four boxes and a small stalls — the standard Italian arrangement of the period, at the smallest end of the scale on which it was ever built.

It is a theatre inside a church shell. The room was carved out of a pre-existing oratory, which is why a building of this date sits in the middle of a medieval walled town without a theatre's usual frontage.

The outside has been worked on recently. The 2024 reopening followed conservation works on the roofs and the facade.

Beyond that, the record is thin and this page will not pad it. No plan, no dimensions, no description of the decoration, the curtain, the stage machinery or the present seating appears in anything read for this page.

Twenty-four boxes for 250 people

The whole capacity of the house, in twenty-four boxes and a small stalls. A full tier arrangement at a scale most towns never attempted.

An opera written for this room

L'Empirico ed il Masnadiero, composed in 1845 specifically for performance at the Aycardi by Ligurian artists of the local Accademia Filarmonica. Finalborgo also has a Società Filarmonica, conventionally dated to 1826.

The oldest on the Ponente

The oldest nineteenth-century theatre of the Ligurian Ponente on its own record, and on the operator's account the oldest nineteenth-century theatre with stalls and boxes conserved in Liguria.

A room made from an oratory

Obtained from the pre-existing oratory of the Padri delle Scuole Pie to a design by Nicolò Barella — or, on the museum's account, from the spaces of a collegio founded by Giovanni Andrea Aycardi in 1759, whose name the theatre bears.

Open again since 2024

After conservation works on the roofs and the facade. Entry is recorded by the operator as by free offering during calendared openings — which is a different thing from an opening hour.