Teatro Argentina

Stand for a moment on the edge of the square and listen. Buses sigh and rattle past. Scooters weave between them. Below street level, in a wide pit of old stone, cats stretch out in the sun among broken columns. And across the traffic, behind a calm, pale facade, sits one of the oldest working theatres in Rome. This is the Teatro Argentina. It has been raising its curtain for nearly three centuries.

The theatre opened in 1732. It was built for the Sforza Cesarini, a powerful Roman noble family who owned land in this part of the city. In the eighteenth century, a private theatre was a statement of status. It said that your family could gather the city's elite under one roof, every night of the season. For an aristocratic house in papal Rome, that was a very public kind of power.

Now, a question many visitors ask. Why is a Roman theatre named after Argentina? The answer has nothing to do with South America. It goes back to a tower nearby, built around the end of the fifteenth century by a papal official named Johannes Burckard. He came from Strasbourg. In Latin, Strasbourg was called Argentoratum, so he signed himself Argentinus. His tower gave its name to the square — and the square gave its name to the theatre.

Look at the building in front of you. The facade is restrained, almost severe. There are no gold statues and no wild ornament. The present front dates from a remodelling in the nineteenth century, when the theatre was updated to match the tastes of the time. Behind this quiet face, though, the interior follows the classic Italian design. The auditorium is shaped like a horseshoe, with tiers of private boxes rising one above another.

That horseshoe shape had a purpose. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, people did not only come to watch the stage. They came to watch each other. Families rented boxes for the whole season. They received guests, ate suppers, played cards, and chatted through the slower scenes. The curved walls meant almost every box could see every other box. A night at the theatre was half performance, and half social parade.

The most famous night in this building came in February 1816. A young composer from the Adriatic coast, Gioachino Rossini, presented a new comic opera. Today we know it as The Barber of Seville. Its overture and its bright, fast arias are among the most performed music in all of opera. You may know the famous call of the barber, Figaro, repeating his own name. That melody was first heard right here.

But here is the surprise. The premiere was a disaster. An older composer, Giovanni Paisiello, had already written a well-loved opera on the same story. His supporters in the audience were not happy that a young man dared to compete. There was whistling, jeering, and laughter at the wrong moments. Legend has it that a cat even wandered onto the stage during the performance. Whether or not the cat is true, the evening went badly.

For the first performances, Rossini even used a different title, Almaviva, or the Useless Precaution, partly to show respect to Paisiello's older work. It did not calm the crowd. And yet, by the second night, the mood had changed. The audience began to listen to the music itself. Within a few years, the opera had travelled across Europe. Its first-night failure became one of the best-loved stories in theatre history.

Rossini was not the only great name connected with this stage. Giuseppe Verdi also premiered operas here in the 1840s. One of them, The Battle of Legnano, opened in 1849, during the revolutionary upheaval in Rome. The opera told the story of Italian cities uniting against a foreign emperor. For audiences longing for a united Italy, the message was clear. The theatre became, for a few nights, a place of political feeling as well as music.

Now turn around and look at the sunken ruins in the middle of the square. This is the Sacred Area of Largo Argentina. It holds the remains of four temples from the time of the Roman Republic, long before the emperors. The ruins were uncovered in the twentieth century, when the old neighbourhood here was cleared. Close by stood part of the great complex built by Pompey the Great, a Roman general and rival of Julius Caesar.

That connection matters. Caesar was killed in a meeting hall that belonged to Pompey's complex, on the Ides of March in 44 BC. Remains linked to that hall lie at the edge of these ruins. So think about the layers here. Within one glance, you can see the place where Rome's Republic began to fall, and a theatre where its music and comedy have played for nearly three hundred years.

Today, the Teatro Argentina is the main stage of the Teatro di Roma, the city's public theatre company. The programme focuses mostly on drama rather than opera now. You might find classic Italian plays, new writing, or visiting productions from other countries. If you can, try to see a performance or join a guided visit. Sitting in one of those boxes, under the curve of the ceiling, you feel how small and close the space really is.

Before you move on, take a last look at the square around you. The cats are still sleeping on the warm stone of the temples. The buses are still turning at the corner. And behind that quiet facade, actors may already be preparing for tonight. Listen once more to the traffic, and imagine the whistles and the laughter of that February night in 1816. The street is noisy, as it was then. And the theatre is still open for the evening.