Putignano - Tourism, history, food and wine, art and culture.

Since the early 1600s there has been news of a small hall, located close to an ancient bastion to the right of the Porta Grande, used for theatrical performances open to the public. Until the end of the 18th century, the restaurant, accessible by a winding and open staircase, is managed by two local companies until, in the 1800s, the room was enlarged with the space of an adjacent large room. At the carnival, the theater was transformed into a huge ballroom where large binges and courtships were consumed.

The theater in its current trapezoidal planimetric configuration was designed in 1880 by the engineer Vincenzo Ventrella and completed in 1887 with the main front on Corso Garibaldi, on the corner of Corso Umberto I.

In 1894 the interiors were completed with three tiers of boxes, a gallery and the stalls with wooden structures decorated with gilded stuccos. Some scenes and the curtain were made by the Bari artist Raffaele Armenise, the same who made the frescoes on the dome of the Petruzzelli theater in Bari, which were then destroyed in the fire of 1991.

In the post-war period the state of degradation of the wooden structures pushed the municipal administration to entrust to private the renovations in exchange for the twenty-year management. Based on a design by the engineer Basile, the theater, transformed into a cinema-theater with a capacity of around 900 seats: it was completely gutted inside, replacing the wooden trusses of the roof that covered the cavea with a wide vault laterocementizia. The cinema-theater inaugurated in 1957 was closed in 1978 due to unusable plant and safety deficiencies.

Only in 1993 were the maintenance work on the roofs and facades restored. The building is characterized by a rectangular structure 35 meters long and 17 meters wide. The roof vault is surmounted by a pitched roof with a height of 17 meters. In December 2008 the De Miccolis administration approved the final restructuring, recovery and restoration project prepared by the municipal technical office. In July 2010, the works contracted out to the Temporary Business Association "Consortium for the Recovery of Artistic Heritage" and "Constazio Stabile Constap" began. To date, the variant project is currently being approved, under the design coordination of the architects Gian Luigi Sylos Labini - SMN Studio di Architettura - and Luigi Dragone, who plans to build a 365-seat room, extension of the scenic tower, a large double-height foyer, the demolition of the concrete vault built after the war, the revival of the roof with wooden trusses with retraction of the tympanum on the façade, coherently with the original layout, in order to use the terrace flat as a lookout and outdoor shows.