Teatro Olimpico Site Features

Palladio built a Roman theatre in a room. The seating is a steep semi-elliptical cavea of wooden tiers, crowned by a colonnade with statues of the Academy's own members, and the ceiling is painted as an open sky -- an interior pretending to be an outdoor space, which is exactly what a Roman theatre was.

The frons scaenae, the architectural back wall of the stage, is a dense classical facade of columns, niches and statues pierced by three openings.

Through those openings runs Scamozzi's stage set: seven street vistas in forced perspective, representing the streets of Thebes. The floors rake steeply upward and the buildings shrink fast, so a corridor of a few metres reads as a long avenue. Actors cannot walk far into them without destroying the illusion, which is a real constraint on staging to this day.

The perspective streets

Scamozzi's 1585 set, still standing. Look along each of the seven vistas in turn; the trick only fully registers when you notice how short they actually are.

The painted sky

A ceiling treated as open air over the seating, completing the illusion that this indoor room is an outdoor Roman theatre.

The statues of the Academy

The colonnade above the seating carries portrait statues of the Accademia Olimpica's own members -- the patrons put themselves in the building.

An unbroken 440-year run

Wood-and-plaster scenery built for one night in 1585, never dismantled. Its survival is as remarkable as its design.

The theatre sits at the north-eastern end of Corso Andrea Palladio, beside Palazzo Chiericati and the city's civic museum, just inside the line of the old walls at Piazza Matteotti.

Its exterior gives nothing away -- a plain brick wall on a courtyard, with no facade to speak of. Everything the building is happens inside, which is why so many people walk past it.