Evaluation of the acoustic Performance of a theatrical space set up in a restored Latomia in Ragusa Iblea

icily has many artistic and architectural treasures, wonderful historical buildings, monasteries, abbeys and convents that are often restored and used as government buildings, university buildings, theatre and collective spaces for exhibitions. They often have elliptic or irregular shapes and characteristic values of absorption and diffusivity coefficient of wall surfaces that cause serious acoustical problems such as standing waves, flutter echo, sound focusing and intensive late reflections (greater than 100 ms). Moreover, long and flat parallel walls cause undesirable flutter echo which decreases speech intelligibility seriously and diminishes the effectiveness of early arriving sound energy. The paper presents the results of an acoustic study on outstanding Latomiaof Gonfalone located in Ragusa Iblea that was restored and is used as marvelous theatrical space. Firstly, the Authors carried out an acoustic measurement campaign to evaluate the main acoustic indices and parameters and set the current acoustic quality. After that, they applied acoustic computer simulations on the Latomia in order to compare the measured data coming from the survey measurements and the data coming from the code. In this way, it has been possible to test the reliability and accuracy of the code and to evaluate on the spatial distribution patterns of speech intelligibility and other acoustic indices defined in ISO 3382. Finally, they have determined the suitable interventions of acoustic correction to improve the acoustic quality of the theatrical space