Rebuilding an urban empty space. The area where the Eretenio Theatre once stood near the River Retrone in Vicenza, Italy

Vicenza is an ancient city located in the Veneto region, not far from Venice, in the north-east corner of Italy. This work specifically refers to the area of the Eretenio theatre on the bank of the River Retrone. The theatre was bombed and destroyed in 1944. Intimately part of the historic center of Vicenza, this abandoned area gradually lost its functional and social identity. The idea of rebuilding that degraded place has long been the object of discussion on the part of local authorities. The Eretenio theatre area is one of the subjects recently investigated by our students at the ‘Architectural and Urban Composition 2' course taught on the master’s degree in Architectural Engineering at the University of Padua. Students were required to present project hypotheses to reconfigure the lost unity of this symbolic part of the city. The history is considered an indispensable tool to know the deep reasons of the urban structure, which can be used to control the change of functional systems (political, social and economic). The Eretenio theatre area was proposed to our students as an opportunity to suggest new ways to manage the passage from past to future in the shadow of Andrea Palladio’s architecture.