The town hall and the theatre of Crevalcore (BO). The buildings' history after the Unification of Italy

Introduction The paper describes the constructive events concerning the Town Hall and the municipal theatre of Crevalcore (BO), result of the historical research belonging to a broader study aimed at analyzing the damage condition of both buildings after the Emilia earthquake (2012). After the Unification of Italy (1860), throughout the Country there was a coherent campaign for renovating public buildings through an architectural idiom which mirrored the new national identity. Despite different geographical and socio-economic contexts, the renovation strategy seems to consist of two main procedures. One called for the reuse (through restructuring and adaptation) of the pre-existing structures, though with new functions. The other called for building from scratch either in empty areas or by replacing existing buildings. In both cases, the projects were heavily influenced by the technological advances and the use of new materials (as steel). The study of the town hall and the theater of Crevalcore provides to analyse those two renovation approaches by showing the construction history of the two most representative public buildings of the city. Developments Until 1860 the theater and the town hall were located in the same building where, since 1726, a small wooden theater found place next to the functions of city government. During the definition of post-unification interventions, some project proposals confirm the integration of the two functions in a single building. However, a lively debate between the local administration and the citizens, these latter unsatisfied with the project proposal advanced for the theater, leads to build the theater in a different area, replacing by mean of demolition a residential building; while the site of town hall was confirmed, providing a palace realized from the transformation of three pre-existing buildings. The final design choices for both the construction of the theater and the transformation of the town hall follow motivations linked to logistical and economic difficulties, which the paper illustrates. In this work, data from archival sources – a rich documentation of both architectural projects found at the Municipal Historical Archive, Central State Archive, Accademia degli Indifferenti e Risoluti Archive – are integrated with those collected with direct survey. Afterwards, the critical interpretation of the whole documentation together with the infield survey allowed the reconstruction of the history of the two buildings’ construction. Remarks and Conclusion This work allows to investigate the micro-history of a small city urban renovation, with a dual value technical and documentary. The analysis of the original projects together with the direct survey let out to study how the constructive techniques and the details showed in the architectural manuals of the nineteenth century are specified in a real building. A general remark concerns that a historical masonry building, above all if sited in historical urban fabric – as in the case of the Theater of Crevalcore – mostly was not realized totally from scratch but, both for economical and constructive reasons, reusing part of pre-existing structures, of which the traces will remain in the new building.