The Project aims at renewing the methodologies and perspectives for investigating the performing arts through dialogue and interdisciplinary cooperation between Humanities (Theatre Studies, Musicology, and Aesthetics) and Social Sciences (Economics and Law) with the help of Informatics.
The focus is wide and covers tackles the development of the performing arts markets in Italy from Unification (1861) to the present days.
The research is based on the cooperation of four research unity based at the Universities of Bologna (coordinator), Genova, Palermo, and Roma La Sapienza. Each unit investigates broad case studies, including drama and opera in the Nineteenth Century through the lens of Adelaide Ristori and Giuseppe Verdi, the financing of theatre between the fascist 1930s and the rise of democracy, and the current framework for the funding of the performing arts in the country. The project aims at filling in the existing gap of knowledge through the analysis of large and hitherto unexplored archival sources that have been produced by major theatrical entities, public institutions, and single individuals on State, regional, and local level over the last 150 years. This wide documentation is of theatrical, economical, juridical, and political nature, and it represents an uncharted reservoir of quantitative and qualitative data: if correctly elaborated and analysed, it is likely to achieve ground-breaking results in terms of the capacity of reading the historical evolution of the Italian theatrical system from the unification to nowadays, also providing anticipatory elements on the future perspectives of the performing arts in Italy.

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