IL TEATRO ROMANO DI POLLENTIA-URBS SALVIA

This work has the primary objective of the organic study of the Roman theater of the city of Pollentia-Urbs Salvia. Although in fact an extensive literature and significant recent contributions already exists about the monument, it remained still basically unpublished since the first scientific investigations conducted since the middle of the last century. This is a key monument in the of the late-republican and august city and it is in fact, over the years, subject to brief notes and partial but never exclusive contributions. A new survey of the monument has made it possible to clarify the origin and the existence of different architectural phases and to specify four different building phases. A first phase relating to the original building structure between the end of the late-republican period, at the time of the foundation of the colony and 23 AD, the year in which, as documented by the epigraph of C. Fufius Geminus, the first theater had to be completed. A second phase framed according to the Tiberian and the claudian age, which, in conjunction with the construction of the temple-cryptoportic complex - a monumental conclusion of the town's urbanization started in the Augustan era - sees the massive expansion structural and planimetric of the building. A third and last phase dated in the Domizian age, which, as documented by the epigraph of C. Salvius Liberalis and C. Salvius Vitellianus, is marked by a series of ornamentation and restoration works and, above all, by the construction of the portico square behind the building itself. With the aim of an organic understanding of the monument the architectural, sculptural and epigraphic materials that came from it has been finally examinated. The work of collecting carried out on the materials from the old excavations has highlighted the dispersion of much of the material and the inevitable decontestionalization of the remaining material, and made it necessary an essentially archival and bibliographic analysis, focussed above all on the substantial sculptural apparatus considered to be part of the theatre, aimed at re-establishing the connection between the context of origin and archive documentation. Although only in isolated cases, and exclusively for sculptures, it was possible to speculate on the exact location of certain elements within the building itself, the survey of ornamental and epigraphic elements was of fundamental importance in order to better define and to embody the different stages of building and refurbishment identified and within which the same materials seem to find today a more appropriate chronological and stylistic location.