On January 31, 1809, during a session presided over by Alessandro Volta, the Como city council decreed “approval for the transfer of the area surrounding the present Theatre, with the substitution of all rights over the site of the Castle where the new Theatre is to be built.” In other words, the Società Palchettisti was authorized to replace the small wooden theatre built in 1764 in the hall of the Broletto with a new building that would take the place of the thirteenth-century Castle of the Torre Rotonda, in what is now Piazza Verdi. The curtain of the Teatro Sociale rose on August 28, 1813, for performances of Adriano in Siria by Antonio Fonseca Portugal and I pretendenti delusi by Giuseppe Mosca. Yet what must have impressed the audience most was the scene painted on the curtain itself—today the “historic velarium,” restored in 2009 and lowered only on rare occasions—depicting the death of Pliny the Elder in AD 79 beneath the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, as described in a famous letter from Pliny the Younger to Tacitus. The subject was chosen by a commission chaired by Giovanni Battista Giovio, who entrusted its execution to Alessandro Sanquirico, stage designer at La Scala in Milan and decorator of aristocratic villas across half of Europe, with a particular fondness for Lake Como: in 1812 he frescoed a room at Villa Melzi in Bellagio, and in 1830 he painted an oil depicting a reception at Villa Sommariva, now Villa Carlotta, where it is still displayed. Giovio and his associates required the artist to introduce a symbolic alteration to the historical event: the young, Apollo-like figure supporting Pliny the Elder in the painting is in fact his nephew, who in reality is known to have remained on the opposite shore, at Cape Misenum, watching the apocalyptic event unfold. In this way, the two “founding fathers” of the city were reunited before the eyes of the people of Como, just as they stand together on either side of the portal of the Cathedral.
