The Venice Fundation for Fortuny Mission

UNA Hotels & Resorts has proven the singular attention it has always given to design and the Italian culture through its purchase of a virtual seat in the “Teatro delle Feste”. Ms. Elena David, CEO, heads in fact a team whose underlying philosophy is to highlight the worth of Italy and its artistic heritage. This is demonstrated by the superb renewal of Florence’s historic “Villa le Maschere”, a five-year long restoration supervised by the Superintendence of the Fine Arts. The Venice Foundation’s sponsorship of the “Fortuny Mission” project forecasts the  restoration of the enormous scale model of the “Teatro delle Feste”, originally built by Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo in 1912 after his meeting with the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio and the architect Lucien Hesse in Paris. The Spanish artist Mariano Fortuny moved to Venice at the age of eighteen, where he remained until his death in 1949. There he established both his home and the notorious studio in the Palazzo Pesaro degli Orfei, now a museum known as the Fortuny Palace. The infrastructurebaptized as “Teatro delle Feste” by D’Annunzio should have been built in Paris’ Esplanade des Invalides, due to the French families’ significant capital contributions. The project consisted of an auditorium roofed by an enormous canvas dome, designed to evoke the sensation of being outdoors, just like in a theatre of Ancient Greece. The restoration of Fortuny’s model, complete with lighting apparatus, has a double function: to halt deterioration without delay, and to emphasize the value of historic and artistic heritage. The fundraising campaign launched by the Venice Foundation has taken up the artists’ original intention of creating a theatre for the masses, foreseeing that part of the funds necessary for the restoration come directly from the “public at large”. Anybody, no matter their financial status, could feel the pride of contributing to the recovery of this theatre that is a jewel of our national heritage. This is thanks to the possibility offered by the “Fortuny Mission” project to book one’s place in the great “Teatro delle Feste” through a donation, complete with the right to inscribe one’s name on the reserved seat.