The Globe Theater in Rome, a Shakespearean theater born in 2003

Born from a dream of Gigi Proietti and the then mayor Walter Veltroni, in 2003, the Globe Theater in Rome, inside the gardens of Villa Borghese, faithful reproduction of the historic London theater where Shakespeare’s company had acted (inaugurated in 1599 and destroyed several times by fires). Three months of work (a record time), the structure was built by the Municipality of Rome and financed by the Silvano Toti Foundation, in memory of the late patron and entrepreneur, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of the park in the capital. The Globe Theater was inaugurated with a classic of Elizabethan theater, ‘Romeo and Juliet’ directed by Gigi Proietti, artistic director of the Roman space for 17 years until his death in 2020. A theater with a precise identity that he saw in the posters alongside Elizabethan tragedies and comedies (Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Richard III, Much Ado About Nothing, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, King Lear, the Merchant of Venice, The Tempest, the Taming of the Shrew) alongside concerts, dance performances, plays in English, up to the last farewell by Gigi Proietti, the great showman, on stage with ‘Edmund Kean’. Today the Globe Theater is directed by Oscar winner Nicola Piovani. It has a circular shape and in this respects the original London, all in oak wood, with three levels of covered boxes, connected to each other by walkways and stairs, and the central area of ​​the public uncovered often populated by young and old who it can hold up to 415 spectators out of a total capacity of over one thousand and 200 seats. The floor is made of tuff blocks, but the impression is that of beaten earth, about 10 meters high for an internal diameter of 23 meters and an external diameter of 33 meters. Furthermore, in 2020, the ‘Gigi Proietti Globe Theater’ Archive was inaugurated, which collects complete filmed recordings, photographs, sketches, director’s notes, press reviews, critical studies and interviews in digital form.