Discover Teatro Olimpico

A plain brick shell in a courtyard off Corso Palladio, giving no sign from outside of what it holds. Inside is a wooden theatre built to look like stone: a semicircle of raked benches facing a towering classical stage front of columns, niches and statues, with streets of foreshortened buildings running away through its three openings — all of it timber, plaster and painted canvas under a sky-painted ceiling.

Palladio built a Roman theatre in a room. The seating is a steep semi-elliptical cavea of wooden tiers, crowned by a colonnade with statues of the Academy's own members, and the ceiling is painted as an open sky -- an interior pretending to be an outdoor space, which is exactly what a Roman theatre was.

The frons scaenae, the architectural back wall of the stage, is a dense classical facade of columns, niches and statues pierced by three openings.

Through those openings runs Scamozzi's stage set: seven street vistas in forced perspective, representing the streets of Thebes. The floors rake steeply upward and the buildings shrink fast, so a corridor of a few metres reads as a long avenue. Actors cannot walk far into them without destroying the illusion, which is a real constraint on staging to this day.