Description
The Teatro Scientifico del Bibiena is a small 18th-century theatre in the centre of Mantua, inside the palace of the Accademia Virgiliana: a bell-shaped hall wrapped in four tiers of painted wooden boxes, where the young Mozart played in 1770.
It was built in just two years, between 1767 and 1769, by Antonio Galli Bibiena, son of a famous family of stage designers. It was called "scientific" because it was meant to host the Academy's meetings, but concerts and plays were held there from the very start. The music has never left: the theatre still hosts festivals, concerts and conferences.
Your eye goes straight to the boxes, divided by columns, in a decoration that gives the whole hall a sense of movement. Bibiena did not just design them: a painter as well as an architect, he personally frescoed their interiors with monochrome figures.
In place of a stage there is a fixed set: a two-storey gallery of serlianas, that is, arches resting on pairs of columns, with a loggia behind and a ceiling painted with mock openwork, framed by a mock balustrade.
In the four niches stand life-size statues of four illustrious Mantuans: Virgil; Baldassare Castiglione, author of The Book of the Courtier; the philosopher Pietro Pomponazzi; and the engineer and cartographer Gabriele Bertazzolo.
Outside, the Neoclassical façade is by Giuseppe Piermarini, the architect who won the competition to rebuild the palace and who gives his name to the hall on the first floor. The new front did not touch the interior, which keeps its Baroque forms.
The theatre opened on 3 December 1769. Just a month and a half later, on 16 January 1770, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart played here, not yet fourteen years old: the programme of that concert is kept in the Academy's archive.
His father Leopold was enchanted and wrote to his wife in Salzburg that he had never seen anything more beautiful of its kind in his life. It was not a theatre, he explained, but a hall with boxes, and the audience never stopped shouting "bravo".
Before the theatre, this was the site of the palace of Ferrante I Gonzaga, an imperial general during the Sack of Rome. In 1562 his son Cesare founded an academy here, that of the Invaghiti, which after several name changes commissioned the new theatre.
Don't miss
• The boxes painted by Bibiena.
• The fixed set with its serlianas.
• The statues of the four illustrious Mantuans.
Did you know?
• Before becoming the Accademia dei Timidi, Mantua's academy was called the Accademia degli Invaghiti and then degli Invitti.
• The hall has only 338 seats.
It was built in just two years, between 1767 and 1769, by Antonio Galli Bibiena, son of a famous family of stage designers. It was called "scientific" because it was meant to host the Academy's meetings, but concerts and plays were held there from the very start. The music has never left: the theatre still hosts festivals, concerts and conferences.
Your eye goes straight to the boxes, divided by columns, in a decoration that gives the whole hall a sense of movement. Bibiena did not just design them: a painter as well as an architect, he personally frescoed their interiors with monochrome figures.
In place of a stage there is a fixed set: a two-storey gallery of serlianas, that is, arches resting on pairs of columns, with a loggia behind and a ceiling painted with mock openwork, framed by a mock balustrade.
In the four niches stand life-size statues of four illustrious Mantuans: Virgil; Baldassare Castiglione, author of The Book of the Courtier; the philosopher Pietro Pomponazzi; and the engineer and cartographer Gabriele Bertazzolo.
Outside, the Neoclassical façade is by Giuseppe Piermarini, the architect who won the competition to rebuild the palace and who gives his name to the hall on the first floor. The new front did not touch the interior, which keeps its Baroque forms.
The theatre opened on 3 December 1769. Just a month and a half later, on 16 January 1770, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart played here, not yet fourteen years old: the programme of that concert is kept in the Academy's archive.
His father Leopold was enchanted and wrote to his wife in Salzburg that he had never seen anything more beautiful of its kind in his life. It was not a theatre, he explained, but a hall with boxes, and the audience never stopped shouting "bravo".
Before the theatre, this was the site of the palace of Ferrante I Gonzaga, an imperial general during the Sack of Rome. In 1562 his son Cesare founded an academy here, that of the Invaghiti, which after several name changes commissioned the new theatre.
Don't miss
• The boxes painted by Bibiena.
• The fixed set with its serlianas.
• The statues of the four illustrious Mantuans.
Did you know?
• Before becoming the Accademia dei Timidi, Mantua's academy was called the Accademia degli Invaghiti and then degli Invitti.
• The hall has only 338 seats.