The “Concezione” Theater

On our voyage among the “lost” theaters of Bologna’s past, we’ve learned there have been two main types of owners since the 18^th century.

On the one hand were the nobles, who created theaters of various sizes in their old palazzi in order to present artists, organize private shows or, in some cases, promote seasons of theater, prose, and music intended for a paying audience.

On the other were those who, in the early 19^th century, were called “immobiliaristi” (“property developers”), i.e., unscrupulous businessmen who (taking advantage of the divestment of church properties ordered by the Jacobin government when Napoleon’s troops arrived) bought churches, oratories, and convents and turned them into theaters, in that era a guarantee of income. These theaters were of different sizes and types, ranging from very large to small and unusual, such as the Concezione Theater (also called the Amateur Theater), set up in the church of the Augustinian sisters of the SS. Concezione on via Saragozza, bought by the Privat family in 1799. The theater was inaugurated only in 1808, and presented almost exclusively prose theater companies made up of amateurs who weren’t afraid of performing works by Goldoni and Alfieri, proposing “academies of extemporaneous poetry” alternating with variety shows with marionettes.

With the Restoration, the Privats managed to claim the scenery from the decommissioned Taruffi Theater and assigned the Concezione Theater to one of the city’s most active semi-professional companies: the Filodrammaturgi, headed by no less than Carlo Bruera.

Over the years, the company included important figures in Bolognese culture from the first half of the century, actors who became fervent patriots, such as Federico Pescantini and Camillo Querzoli, Alamanno Leonesi and, especially, Gustavo Modena, writer and follower of Mazzini, in Bologna to study law at the university, where he graduated in 1821.

In 1819, the offer expanded to what we now call “variety shows,” and in the evenings the theater presented music and magic shows, circus numbers and all sorts of entertainment.

For example, on 26 December of that year, the program celebrated “Bolognese citizen Luigi Sasselli,” who offered “a small number of Representations of Mechanical and Mathematical Amusements, which he will perform with greatest dexterity, as he did in other locations with entirely new machines and ornaments” and “following the dictates of necessary prudence, he promises nothing and reserves the right to prove his worth.”

Sasselli was so successful that he was invited to return the next year, on 12 March 1820, promising the audience “surprising experiments,” i.e., “new amusements and pleasant machines that will make everything I did previously seem like nothing.” This time he also proposed a number employing phantasmagoria, “The chair of Proserpina, the wandering Spirit expelled from the infernal Abyss,” which, according to the program, is exhibited throughout Italy exclusively by Sasselli.

Nevertheless, and perhaps because of cutthroat competition by many other places presenting public performances, the Concezione Theater had a hard time staying open. It lasted until 1823, when it was permanently closed and converted into an artisan’s workshop.

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