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The three tiers of boxes after restoration. The celling of the theater with Piero Cuccione's tondo painting.
The New Garibaldi Theater
After extensive renovation, the Teatro Garibaldi has reopened in the heart of Sicily with a great painting by Piero Guccione.
by Franco Antonio Belgiorno
For those arriving in Modica during any season of the year, the clothes drying in the sun in the upper town bring to mind paper garlands hung up to celebrate the birthday of the stone edifices. Spread over the slopes of five hills, the upper town is twinned with a lower town including buildings of rare beauty. The churches are especially enchanting, and seem to have cornered all the saints in the calendar between April and August, when the ancient bronzes lose all restraint and blaze forth with piratical ferocity.
This Sicilian town, the seat of the Norman Chiaramonte family back in the 13th century, has stubbornly enduring traditions.This may be why its quiet narrow streets still form miniature republics where the lower and middle classes live side by side in peaceful harmony. Balconies with scrolled Spanish-style railings decorate steep ridges crammed with houses and courtyards where, by some oversight of present-day civilization, images of St. George on his white charger trampling the dragon are still to be found intact. Like a gigantic fossil, this panorama forms the backdrop for one of Sicily's most splendid Baroque churches, dedicated of course to the Cappadocian saint. Standing midway between the upper town and the lower, the church soars like a mountain crag to a height of 62 meters. The porous stone used to build it absorbs sunlight during the day to assume a range of pastel shades from pale yellow to pink. It rises from a chalice-shaped flight of 250 steps. Seen from above on the way from Ragusa, Modica is like an eighteenth-century print. Memories of the past live on in this peaceful and highly civilized town. And it is here that our story unfolds, the tale of an old theater restored and one of the best-loved Italian painters of our day, Piero Guccione. To tell this tale, however, we must go back to the lower town, which is dominated by the Cathedral of St. Peter. This second Baroque gem, whose steps are decorated with twelve rustic apostles of stone placidly whiling away the time, is on Corso Umberto, a long strip of asphalt that rises through the old customs barrier to meet the Teatro Garibaldi. Around 1820 an old warehouse was demolished and public funds were used to build a "splendid theater" with two rows of twenty gradetti or boxes and a pit measuring thirty-two palivi (about eight meters). The ladies of the day would sigh in the candlelight over the verses of Vittorio Alfieri's Saul, and later over the tragic adventures of Alexandre Dumas’s Dame aux camélias. The audience grew, and thus it was that in 1833 the "most excellent municipal authorities” decided to expand and remodel the premises. Finally, in 1858, the Teatro Comunale was born. It had three rows of boxes, a gallery and a pit measuring seventy palmi (about seventeen meters), as in its present layout. It was inaugurated with La Traviata, performed to great acclaim by the Rossi & Naselli Company. Sicily was then caught up in the Risorgimento, and the town council unanimously voted to rename the theater after Garibaldi. The period of greatest glory was from 1900 to 1940, when the theater, affectionately known as the bomboniera or candy box, was a meeting place for the local people and enthusiasts from many nearby towns. Its boards were trodden by many who were then famous but are now forgotten, such as Ninchi, De Sanctis, Chiantoni, Gemmò, D'Origlia and the great Emma Gramatica, who performed before an enraptured audience in George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan. Looking back through forgotten newspapers, we discover that certain seasons offered a veritable cornucopia of riches, including the thrilling emotions of opera and the madcap comedy of Angelo Musco. The 1950s then marked the dawn of a new era, and the theater fell out of favor. Converted into a cinema, it was packed out by a frivolous new breed of spectator. At the end of the 1960s, it was the Garibaldi’s fate to fall silent. Today, thanks to a dynamic mayor, the theater has been brought back to life.
As a boy, Piero Guccione came to Modica on foot from Scicli, his home town, to buy paints and brushes. At that time, he must have been dazzled and inspired by the church of St. George, and often spoke to friends from Modica of the bewitching light that seemed to linger on the church until late in the evening. It may have been then that Guccione, a painter of light par excellence and master of pale hues, first imagined the circular painting that was to decorate the ceiling of the Teatro Garibaldi some fifty years later on its reopening after extensive renovation.
Based on Guccione's sketches and painted by the master together with Piero Roccasalva and Giuseppe Colombo from Modica and Franco Sarnari from Rome, the canvas is a masterpiece of its type. Reaching out to embrace the town as a whole, the majestic church of St. George, framed in a perspective of blue and yellow hues and drenched in dazzling sunlight, seems to become one with silence. The figures magically appearing on the steps constitute a poetic reconciliation of European music and painting: Verdi’s Macbeth, Bellini’s Norma, Handel's Messiah, Monteverdi’s Rinaido and Armida, Wagner's Tristan and Iseult, Rossini's Moses and, right in the foreground, Mozart’s Don Giovanni. The last figure is the most emblematic of the group. Piero Guccione painted the unrepentant rake descending the great staircase as Mozart's prisoner, his dark garments vibrating to the master's music. But this Don Giovanni, accompanied by the d'après figures portrayed with joyous invention by the other three artists, has nothing of the "minuet” or the seducer’s frivolous voracity. And nothing of the antihero reviled by Leporello in his enumeration of his master’s conquests. It is hard to imagine what other figure could have succeeded so wonderfully in wedding Piero Guccione’s beloved northern climes to his southern homeland. Set against the blue Sicilian skies, Don Giovanni seems to have lost his turbulent spirit and become the fleeting image of a world that has grown too harsh. His body has taken on the gossamer lightness of memory and the evanescence of the red hibiscus to which he points. In the midst of this explosion of southern light, he seems to be walking slowly away from bygone times towards the days to come, two very fitting elements for a refurbished theater that has acquired a masterpiece. It is as though the past, shattered into a thousand pieces, were recomposed in this splendid painting, which will join with the theater housing it to attract new stories of illusion and make-believe to be repeated for the delight of the whole town after so many years of darkness.
Franco Antonio BELGIORNO, writer and journalist, is the author among other books of L'arca sicula (published by Sellerio).
ULISSE 2000 NOVEMBRE 2000
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