Centro teatrale Universitario di Genova (CUT Genova)

Different theater companies have been active at the University of Genoa.

History

GUF of Genoa

In Genoa, the first university theater was founded during the Fascist era within the GUF (Fascist University Group). However, “the spectacle products of Genoese students leaned more towards cinema than theater.”

Sezione Teatro della Delegazione Ligure dell’Associazione italiana di cultura classica (1951-53)

After World War II, university students in Genoa began staging plays in 1951, but this did not immediately coincide with the official establishment of a CUT. The activities carried out until 1953 were extremely important in terms of the quality of the work and the success achieved in Genoa, Liguria, and even northern Italy, where a tour was organized. At the origin of it all were Vito Molinari, a law student with a passion for theater, and Francesco Della Corte, a professor of Latin literature. The idea was to stage classical texts (translated by Della Corte and directed by Molinari, then 22 years old) for an audience consisting mainly of university students. The initiative initially involved mainly classical students, who gathered in the Ligurian delegation of the AICC, based in the Institute of Classical Philology at Balbi 6, in the hall of Palazzo Balbi Raggio. The form of performance favored by the group was not actual staging, but dramatic reading, or rather “animated and dramatized reading.” The first academic year season (1951-52) focused entirely on Plautine comedy. In the following academic year, 1952-53, the theater group enjoyed unexpected success, beyond the university classrooms, thanks to Della Corte's idea of staging a series of famous trials from antiquity.