Teatro Nuovo (Naples)

The Teatro Nuovo (New Theatre) is a theatre located on Via Montecalvario in the Quartieri Spagnoli district of Naples. The original theatre was an opera house designed by Domenico Antonio Vaccaro. Completed in 1724, it was also known as the Teatro Nuovo sopra Toledo and the Teatro Nuovo de Montecalvario. The theatre specialised in the opera buffa genre and saw the world premieres of hundreds of operas in its heyday. These included fifteen of Cimarosa's operas and seven of Donizetti's. The present theatre is the third to have been erected on the site following its destruction by fire in 1861 and again in 1935.

The first theatre was originally owned by Giacinto de Laurentis and Angelo Carasale who had it built on a small garden near the church of Santa Maria della Concezione a Montecalvario. It was designed by Domenico Antonio Vaccaro who had also designed the reconstruction of the church. Prior to the construction of the Teatro Nuovo, the Teatro dei Fiorentini was the only theatre in Naples hosting performances of opera buffa written in Neapolitan dialect. It was, however, very small (seating only 250 people), was lit by only two large torches, and had not been originally built as an opera house. The ever-increasing popularity of the opera buffa genre led to local impresarios opening new theatres to accommodate the new audiences. The Teatro della Pace which opened the same year as the Teatro Nuovo was as small as the Fiorentini and had been converted from a private prose theatre in the home of Prince Tiberio Carafa.

The Teatro Nuovo was the first theatre in Naples to be purpose-built for staging opera. It had what would become the classic "horseshoe" shape and was considered to be a marvel of design for the size of the audience it could accommodate on a very small plot of land. With 140 seats in the orchestra stalls and five tiers of thirteen boxes each, it was able to accommodate 1000 spectators. Its capacity, lighting and acoustics led one contemporary commentator to remark that "from the impossible was born the possible". Vaccaro's plans for the Teatro Nuovo would later serve as the basis for the design of the much larger Teatro San Carlo by Giovanni Antonio Medrano.

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