Dates and curiosities about the genesis of Verdi

The need to identify an area capable of welcoming a new theatrical building in Salerno is already alive at the dawn of the fifth decade of the nineteenth century.
The15 November 1843, in fact, the Province Intendent proposes two places for the eigenda construction:
the wide Santa Teresa, located in the western part of the city, and the wide barrier outside Portanuova, which extends on the opposite side.
The debate on the opportunity to opt for one or another site, the problems related to the financing of the work and the slowness of the Bourbon bureaucracy prevent, for twenty years, that the building is realized. The intricate affair knows its positive dissolution only after the establishment of the Kingdom of Italy, when the bored querelle on the municipal theatre returns to the honors of the chronicles re-presenting, in all its urgency, to the post-resurgent political class. In the session of 15 December 1863, the City Council, for the firm will of the new mayor Matteo Lucani, resolves the controversial issue, choosing the area of Santa Teresa as a place on which the building will have to rise.
The first project, signed by the engineers Petrilli and De Luca in 1844, is under review by architect Antonio Genovese.
However, the final one is Antonino D’Amora, chief engineer of the Civil Genius of Salerno, and architect Giuseppe Manichini. They will also be entrusted with the direction of the work.
The building consists of a building of 65 m long and 35 m wide; it has two symmetric appendixes, corresponding respectively to the entrance area and the retropalco. In the external joints, especially in its front, it proposes the neoclassical scheme, already experimented by Piermarini for the Scala di Milano and the Piccolini for the Massimo Neapolitan; the internal plant of San Carlo is, moreover, resumption, reduced and adapted for that of the Municipale Salernitana.
TheApril 1864the works, entrusted by the contractor Vincenzo Fiorillo, which, in 1867, for the increased design difficulties and the consequent economic attack, are also associated Bonaventura della Monica, with the support of the capitals, and the enterprise of Antonio Avallone, for the realization of the complex construction work.
TheOctober 1869the rustic is completed and you give course to the decoration works. The master of the image of the Municipal Theatre is Gaetano D’Agostino, a painter and decorator of great talent, who chooses to be flanked by the most prestigious names in the academic world of Naples.
I’m next to him: Domenico Morelli, Pasquale Di Criscito, Ignazio Perricci, Giuseppe Sciuti and a rich side of Salernitana: his brother antonio, his cousin Ermenegildo Caputo, Matteo Amendola and the sculptor Giovan Battista Amendola, originally from Episcopate of Sarno. From the foyer, the iconographic design is very clear: the images chosen must communicate the destination of use of the place, conceived as a temple of music and, in particular, of the tradition of beautiful song. At the centre of the peristyle is the sculpture by Giovan Battista Amendola depicting Pergolesi dying, whose symbolic function is to introduce the viewer within the temple of music. Of it is Lord encountered Gioachino Rossini who, at the center of the plafond, from the top of a balustrade, assaults to supreme expression of the Italian and Neapolitan musical genius, having the artist dominated the Neapolitan scene in the years between 1815 and 1822. The muses crown him, proceeding from the bleu of Prussica of the sky and holding hands in a choreographic carousel. Minor sisters of the superb and lawful deities of Paolo Veronese, of the flowery and voluptuous figures of Pietro da Cortona, of the lightest and most aerial ones of the Tiepolo, the muses of the Salento ceiling scandalize the pure coltissimo Francesco Saverio Malpica.
These, while considering the Di Criscito painter of uncommon gifts, in two letters addressed to a friend in 1872, and then published in Salerno, wrote that in the ceiling of the Municipal Theatre had not been able to identify a distant shade of artistic inspiration, being Rossini portrayed with a “full moon face” and the muses as “….women big and fat that dimenate buttocks, legs and arms…”. Incurring of such clamors, the nine sisters are abundant neo-baroque graces, enveloping, in their festive roundabout, the allegory of musicality, in tunic bleu and candida hand to the ear; the melody, effigytated the musical power, whose allus intensity is entrusted to the sound of a buccina, which gives breath a marine creature.
Behind Rossini opens a sequence of paintings inspired by his most significant works, written in Italy before his departure to Paris: Tancredi, Armida, Otello, the Barber of Seville, Moses in Egypt and Semiramide. If the sky of the Di Criscito represents the consecration of the hall to the great season of the Italian melodrama, the curtain is entrusted with the task of celebrating the history of the city, evoking a glorious episode of the past. Thanks to his personal friendship, D’Agostino obtains that both the master Domenico Morelli realize the most emblematic work of the theatre.
The episode chosen is the Saracen Hunt from Salerno, which took place in the summer of 871, when the Salernitans, led by Prince Guaiferius, opposed resistance to Amareni invaders, led by the violent Abdila. From the literary sources Morelli traces the moment when the Saracens, strong of their military superiority, advance to avenge seventy men of their hosts, killed by their opponents during a lightning raid beyond the walls. The alliance of three towns of Salerno, Benevento and Capua, illustrated in the upper medallion, in the center of the curtain, the popular competition, exemplated in the figures of the archers and women, painted in the eight cameos of the frame, symbolize the heroic and victorious resistance of Salerno. Twenty-four preparatory drawings, the final draft, two large studies of the central episode, constitute the entire iter of the Morailian work. In fact, the transposition of the work on the 122 square meters telon is entrusted to two painters very close to the master: Giuseppe Sciuti, Sicilian of Zafferana Etnea, who paints all the figures, Ignazio Perricci, architect of Monopoli di Bari, who elaborates the precious frame.
It is the true originality of the sumptuous curtain. Its elegant yellow-blue medallions balance perfectly with the historical tale, built on the skillful dosing of great choreography by melodrama and exotic oriental touches to Mariano Fortuny. Masterpieces, carvers and indorers of proven craft flank the D’Agostino in the realization of the decorations. On the parapets of the first row posts stand out of the putti that hold a medallion; in the second, there are powerful neo-manier giants with the body bloomed in the chalice in the lower end; in the third, female figures join to draw a cameo, which welcomes the effigies of a poet, a painter and a musician.
In these medallions, from right to left, compared to those entering the hall, are depicting: Vincenzo Bellini, Domenico Cimarosa, Giovan Battista Pergolesi, Carlo Goldoni, Gioachino Rossini, Gaetano Donizetti, Vittorio Alfieri, Torquato Tasso, Dante Alighieri, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Raffaello Sanzio, Giotto, Leonardo da Vinci, Andrea Sabatini, Benvenuto Cellini, Salvator Rosa and Giuseppe Verdi. The Municipal Theatre of Salerno (Teatro Giuseppe Verdi since 1902, by resolution of the City Council)was inaugurated on March 30, 1872 with the representation of the Rigoletto by Giuseppe Verdi.