Teatro Nazionale

The Teatro Nazionale stands on Via del Viminale at the corner of Via Agostino Depretis. The Teatro dell'Opera di Roma, which runs it, records that it was born as a cinema called the Supercinema, built in 1925 within a pre-existing building; that its owner, commendatore Urbano Rattazzi, commissioned the design from the architects Arnaldo Foschini and Attilio Spaccarelli with the engineer Giacomo Giobbe; that the hall measured 36 metres by 30 and originally seated 2,500 between stalls and galleries; and that the interior was decorated in Italian liberty style with gilded stucco, paintings, stone and fabric. An orchestra pit indicates that variety and other live forms alternated with film. From the postwar years it was a cinema only. At the end of the 1990s the Comune di Roma acquired the Supercinema and handed it to the Fondazione Teatro dell'Opera di Roma as a second house.