Patrimonio culturale dell'Emilia-Romagna

In the second half of the nineteenth century, after the demolition of the temporary arenas built in the city’s bastions and the fire that destroyed Teatro Aliprandi (1881), Modena was lacking a theatre for hosting performances aimed at the entertainment of the general public. The merchant Gaetano Storchi filled this empty niche when, out of his own pocket and for benefit purposes, he built his eponymous theatre - designed by the architect Vincenzo Maestri – and founded a religious charity to aid the sick and the needy with the proceeds from theatre performances.
Unlike the Teatro Comunale, which overlooked one of the city centre’s main thoroughfares, the Teatro Storchi was built on a plot of land that was ceded to the municipality free of charge and located in an area newly classified as suitable for development after the demolishment of Porta Bologna (1882) and the construction of the Barriera Garibaldi (1884). This location also led to the theatre’s unique architectural structure, with a double façade – the main one looking northwards towards Piazza (now Largo) Garibaldi, and a west-facing façade looking towards the promenade along the town’s walls (now Martiri della Libertà) – built in a Greek-Roman style according to the eclectic principles in vogue at the time, which Maestri was quite familiar with, as he was a fine scholar of Antiquity and its literature, and a learned builder and restorer of homes for the newly emerging bourgeoisie.
The architect designed a formally elegant and harmonious project, in which the refined use of sculpted decorations differentiated the various parts of the building, which had modern service facilities, a ridotto, fumoir, and café. The theatre however was built with limited funds, on land that soon proved to be unstable, and using second-rate materials that soon compromised the building’s stability; by Maestri’s own admission, the decorations turned out to be coarse and hurried, so that when the theatre was completed, its unembellished appearance was a far cry from the images in the journal Ricordi di Architettura (1887, vol. X, fs. IX, tab. II) where the original drawings were published. The front of the building has two avant-corps with a double order of paired windows crowned by a tympanum; between the two avant-corps are two loggias with architraves, one with a Doric colonnade and another with an Ionic colonnade, covered by a terrace at the same level as the avant-corps’ cornice. The façade that looks towards the city’s walls is partitioned in the same way, but the original design featured a ground-floor loggia covered with an accessible terrace.
When it was inaugurated on the evening of March 24, 1889 with E. Usiglio’s opera Le donne curiose, the theatre had a horseshoe-shaped main floor accessed via an atrium with cast-iron columns, and a gallery with an iron parapet and wooden terraces. The hall had a conch vault painted by the Carpi-born painter Fermo Forti (who was helped by Giuseppe Migliorini), depicting the apotheosis of Gioacchino Rossini and Carlo Goldoni with allegoric images and clear tones. The staircase on the second order led to the foyer, which in turn led to the balconies; service facilities and living quarters were on the upper floor, a café was on the ground floor, the dressing rooms for the actors were behind the stage, and underneath it, thanks to a movable floor, were the stables for the horses used during equestrian performances.
Expert evaluations performed shortly before the theatre opened discovered some cracks on the eastern and western façades. In 1893, similar cracks were found, along with structural deficiencies in the ceiling which, along with the theatre’s poor acoustics and damage to the stage, led to its radical renovation the following year, under the engineer Luigi Sfondrini from Milan, who designed the Teatro Costanzi in Rome and Teatro Verdi in Padua. He renovated the roof, slightly modified the curvature of the hall, and built (in 1895) the second loggia on the western façade (A.St.C. Modena, Atti amministrativi, 1892, f. 298, fs. Teatri, pz. Teatro ed Opera Pia Storchi).
In the years that followed, the roof was being renovated on an almost continuous basis; in 1929 the exterior was renovated and the plastering and cornices restored under the direction of the engineer Francesco Benvenuti Messerotti, and in 1931 radical changes made by the architect Mario Baciocchi of Milan gave the hall its current aspect.
The work – which was carried out by Zeno Carani, the well-known engineer who built Sassuolo’s theatre – included backing up the balustrades up against the boxes, thus enlarging the main floor (whose flooring was redone), which was further enlarged by the creation of an orchestra pit partly located underneath the renovated stage and trellises. A glass and iron frame was placed in the skylight on the ceiling (built by Sfondrini), while the hall’s decorations and lighting system were also redone, and the offices, café5, and remaining rooms restored, for a total expenditure of 350,000 liras (A.ST.C. Modena, Opera Pia Storchi, 1927-31, f. IX, fs. 1929, 31).
The municipality of Modena assumed responsibility for its management in 1981, and additional restoration efforts ended in 1986; since then, the theatre has resumed an active bill of events.