The Theatre of the Moon

Aldo Rossi – Teatro del Mondo – inaugurated in Venice Italy, 1979

Il The Theatre of the Moon It was inaugurated in Venice, Italy in 1979 and was one of the installations at the 1980 Venice Biennale.
It was, and still is, one of the most evocative projects of Aldo Rossi's work. The Theater was built in a basin of Fusina, a small port in the lagoon, on a barge. It was then towed to Venice and moored at Punta della Dogana, on the Grand Canal, in front of Piazza San Marco.

The building consisted of a load-bearing structure in steel tubes covered with a wooden plank and reached a total height of 25 meters. The main body of the Theater consisted of a parallelepiped with a square base of about 9,5 meters per side and a height of 11 meters. On its summit an octagonal drum supported a pitched zinc roof. Inside the stage was located in the center, and the audience sat at the sides or in the galleries on the upper floor reachable by stairs located at the sides of the parallelepiped.
The Theatre could accommodate up to 400 spectators, 250 of whom were seated. At the end of the Biennale events, the Teatro del Mondo crossed the Adriatic to reach Dubrovnik. In 1981 the work was dismantled.

In 2004 the Theatre was rebuilt in Genoa as one of the installations for the celebrations of “Genoa European Capital of Culture”. Since the original project drawings were not found, the reconstruction of the Teatro del Mondo took place after in-depth studies, allowing for the perfect reproduction of the work from both an architectural and structural point of view.
Source Wikipedia: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teatro_del_Mondo