Legnago and Antonio Salieri

Antonio Salieri was born in Legnago on 18th August 1750. He was the seventh child of the trader Antonio Salieri and his second wife Anna Maria Scachi. Salieri senior, raised in a family who loved music, soon decided to push his son to take violin lessons. In 1766, after his parents’ death, Antonio Salieri left Legnago and moved to Venice, where the nobleman Giovanni Mocenigo took care of his education. In May 1766 Ferdinando Pacini, a tenor of St. Marco’s chapel, introduced him to the Viennese chamber music composer Florian Leopold Gaßmann, who took him with himself to Vienna. The career of the young composer from Legnago began to thrive over there. The house where Salieri was born, deeply restored, is still visible today only outside, in Via Disciplina (a plaque commemorates the famous musician’s birth); instead the original entrance door is in the indoor garden of Fioroni palace. The fortress old theatre, probably built during the second half of the seventeenth century, stood few metres far from Salieri’s house. The “municipal place”, as it is often mentioned in the sources, was public and was located in the so-called Theatre Neighbourhood, between the Cathedral Neighbourhood and Discipline Neighbourhood (today at the corner of Via Disciplina and Via Rosselli). The old theatre, where Antonio Salieri also played in 1807 during his only visit to Legnago, was closed in 1903 due to the precarious state of the building; afterwards, it became a firemen barracks and it was definitely destroyed by the Second World War bombings. Local residents lived without a real theatre just for a short time, in fact in the early twentieth century the Theatre Anonymous Company felt the need to have a building suitable for opera performances and for the town urban development. Thus a new and ambitious project was drawn up in 1911; the structure of the new building was already well under way in 1914, when works stopped due to the outbreak of the First World War. Afterwards, works started again but the theatre was opened only in 1933. The following year the theatre was named after the famous musician Antonio Salieri, whose name still today characterizes the big theatre of Via XX Settembre.