Preserving the Memory of Live Performance
Since 1974, the Centro Studi of the Teatro Stabile di Torino has been dedicated to collecting and preserving playbills, posters, reviews, photographs, programme notes, prompt scripts, costume and set designs, video recordings, and directors’ notes. Its work goes beyond safeguarding, accumulating, and organizing materials as a museum or institutional archive. It actively and continuously updates and expands its collections using both traditional and advanced digital formats. The primary goal of this activity is to provide an effective public service: every weekday, the Centro Studi offers students, teachers, theatre professionals, subscribers, and all citizens interested in theatre access to an impressive wealth of historical documentation and texts, including a library of over 30,000 volumes and an extensive archive of 20th-century productions.
This archive is unique in Italy because it is built upon the collection of the historic theatre magazine Il Dramma (1925–1973), founded and directed in Turin by Lucio Ridenti. Upon Ridenti’s death in 1973, the Centro Studi was established, continuing and expanding the archive year after year up to the present day. On the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Teatro Stabile di Torino, in 2015, the entire body of documentation on the theatre’s history—from its foundation in 1955 to the present—was digitized and made available online. This includes records of over 700 productions and more than 60,000 archival pages, such as press clippings and releases, photographs, programme booklets, scripts, playbills, posters, and stage design sketches. To this historic archive, one must also add the 70,000 pages of the complete collection of Il Dramma, which are also available through the online archive.
Since 2019, the Library Catalogue has also been available on the Online Archive page, allowing for integrated resource searches. While research on the Ridenti papers continues, the ongoing collaboration with the University has led to the development of the eighth edition of Retroscena—a series of talks that extends and deepens the theatre’s work in audience education, in synergy with its performance programming.
The Centro Studi of the Teatro Stabile di Torino has been officially recognized as a Research Institution by Decree of the President of the Council of Ministers dated February 25, 2009.
Public Access Service – Teatro Stabile di Torino
Via Rossini 12 – 10124 Turin
Monday to Friday, from 9:30 AM to 1:00 PM and from 2:30 PM to 5:30 PM
By appointment only – Tel. +39 011 5169 405 / 428 or by writing to biblioteca@teatrostabiletorino.it
The Centro Studi is a member of CoBiS
Coordination of Special and Specialized Libraries of Turin.