Teatro San Leonardo, Viterbo

The Teatro San Leonardo is the small stage for mainly intimate dramas, concerts, and screenings located on Via Cavour #9 central Viterbo, region of Lazio, Italy. It also sponsors a school for the dramatic arts for both children and adults. The building has had various reincarnations over the centuries. Once a town prison, it also housed a church dedicated to San Leonardo, staffed by the confraternity of the same name, which attended to the incarcerated and poor. The site was converted into a theater

History and description

The church once at the site was consecrated in 1641, under the administration of the Confraternity (Sodalizio) of San Leonardo. During the Napoleonic occupation of the town, it was deconsecrated and made into a prison, which spanned between via Cavour and Via Leonardo. Reconsecrated again in 1816 by Bishop Severoli, it later became a theater. Its present reincarnation was made possible by communal, provincial, and national patronage. The building had become the civic jail in 1576, and a church built alongside by 1636. The church once had an altarpiece depicting St Leonard, patron saint of prisoners, painted by Anton Angelo Bonifazi. In 1960, it was inaugurated as the auditorium Pope John XXIII for children's movies, to becoming a theater school in 1991, and a theater in 2017. Above the portal is a cardinal's coat of arms with an eagle.

A modern parish church dedicated to St Leonardo Murialdo is located in the suburbs east of the historic center of Viterbo.