The Teatro Municipale is a theatre in Reggio Emilia

Reggio Emilia

Reggio Emilia is an affluent city in northern Italy, in the Emilia-Romagna region. It has about 170,000 inhabitants and is the main comune of the Province of Reggio Emilia....

, Northern Italy

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

. Following the destruction by fire of the 1741 Teatro Cittadella in April 1851, the new theatre was designed by the architect Cesare Costa and connstructed in the neoclassic

Neoclassical architecture

Neoclassical architecture was an architectural style produced by the neoclassical movement that began in the mid-18th century, manifested both in its details as a reaction against the Rococo style of naturalistic ornament, and in its architectural formulas as an outgrowth of some classicizing...

 style between 1852 and 1857. Its inauguration took place on 21 April 1857 with the performance of the Vittor Pisani by local composer Achille Peri

Achille Peri

Achille Peri was an Italian composer and conductor. He is best known for his operas which were strongly influenced by the music of Giuseppe Verdi.-Life and career:...

.

It is the pre-eminent public theatre of the city and is located in its historical centre next to the public park and near the smaller and more recent theatre Teatro Ariosto. It sponsors concerts, operas and ballet performance, while the adjacent, smaller, and more recently-built Teatro Ariosto serves a more intimate stage for dramatic performances. The theatre has a rectangular base that measures 80 x 43.60 meters and covers an area of 3,763 square meters. The audience capacity is 1150 people. It has 56 dressing rooms for the artists and 16 anterooms. The concert hall is elliptical

Ellipse

In geometry, an ellipse is a plane curve that results from the intersection of a cone by a plane in a way that produces a closed curve. Circles are special cases of ellipses, obtained when the cutting plane is orthogonal to the cone's axis...

 and has 106 boxes placed on four tiers plus a regal box and a gallery. The frescoes on the ceiling are of the local artist Domenico Pellizzi. The curtain was painted by Alfonso Chierici.

The outside is composed by 12 Tuscan

Tuscan order

Among canon of classical orders of classical architecture, the Tuscan order's place is due to the influence of the Italian Sebastiano Serlio, who meticulously described the five orders including a "Tuscan order", "the solidest and least ornate", in his fourth book of Regole generalii di...

 columns made of granite on the ground floor while on the first floor it has 13 windows spaced by Ionic

Ionic order

The Ionic order forms one of the three orders or organizational systems of classical architecture, the other two canonic orders being the Doric and the Corinthian...

 columns. On top of the building there are statues made by sculptors Prudenzio Piccioli, Ilario Bedotti, Giovanni Chierici, Antonio Ilarioli, Attilio Rabaglia.