Politeama

I wasn’t looking for it. It was Sunday, I was walking Como with no particular route — the lake, then away from the lake, into the ordinary part of the city where people actually live — and I came round a corner and there it was. A whole block of shut theatre, sitting in traffic. Cars at the lights, a couple of people crossing, nobody looking up.

You know the type from the outside. Ochre plaster going soft at the edges, shutters closed, weeds in the setback. What gives it away is the sign: a vertical steel frame bolted to the corner, letters stacked down it — POLITEAMA — still there, still legible, advertising nothing.

Then you get inside, and the building stops being a facade and becomes a room.

I’ve stood in a lot of empty buildings. Most of them are impressive because of what’s broken. This one is impressive because of what’s still there. Two tiers of boxes curve all the way round, one above the other, and the ceiling above them is a coffered dome ringed with glass roundels and plaster ornament — the kind of thing nobody has commissioned in eighty years and nobody could afford to now. Under it, the seats are still in their rows. Not scattered, not stripped. In rows, facing a stage that still has its curtain hung.

Most empty buildings are impressive because of what’s broken. This one is impressive because of what’s still there.

That’s the thing that got me. The room is not a ruin. It’s a room that was closed one evening and simply never opened again, and everything since has been slow — dust, damp coming through the plaster, tags on the back wall, scaffolding standing in the stalls from some repair that started and stopped. It’s all reversible. That’s rarer than collapse.

1942, still on the wall

Backstage there’s a strip of bare wood with a poster torn across it, most of it gone. Enough survives to read: LA GRANDE FIAMMA, in orange caps. Regia di Jules Dassin. Prodotto da Joseph L. Mankiewicz. The MGM cast list runs up the tear and disappears.

That’s a 1942 picture. It has been stuck to that wall, in the dark, through everything this building has and hasn’t been since.

Under the balcony a sign still says vietato fumare, to nobody. On the way out I stood in the aisle for a while and listened to the traffic going past outside, ten metres and one wall away from the best interior in the city.

This is real heritage, sitting empty in the middle of a town that walks past it every day. It deserves to be a theatre again.