Teatro Edicola: The Theater that Lives between the Underground and the Sky
Written by Luciano Magaldi Sardella
Published on June 10th, 2026
On the morning of World Theatre Day, March 27, 2026, a former newsstand on via Tondi in San Severo — a mid-sized town in the sunburned flatlands of northern Puglia — reopened its shutters for the first time in six years.
But it was not selling newspapers. Six chairs had been arranged inside the metal-and-glass kiosk, and an actor was already in position. The audience — all six of them, seated less than a meter from the performer — had scanned a QR code posted on the door that read, in Italian: “This QR transforms passersby into actors. Scan only if you are ready.”
Every fifteen minutes, a new group of six entered. Every fifteen minutes, the door closed on the city and opened onto Euripides, Goldoni, Čechov, Ibsen, Giorgio Gaber, Stefano Benni.
By late afternoon, hundreds of people had waited in line on the sidewalk of a mid-Puglian street not typically associated with theatrical pilgrimage. Many emerged with red eyes. Others, according to company director Francesco Gravino, left with what he described as a sorriso sospeso — a suspended smile — “as if they had witnessed something secret.”
This was the inaugural performance of what Gravino and his theatrical company, Foyer ’97, now called Teatro Edicola — the ‘Newsstand Theater’. It is, they claim, the world’s smallest theater.
And whether or not that record holds up to scrutiny, the project encapsulates something larger: a decades-long, stubbornly local, radically proximate practice of making theater in every kind of place except the one you’d expect.
Starting from the pavement
Foyer ’97 has been operating since 1997, and the company’s founding premise is almost a manifesto in miniature. “We start from the sidewalks,” Gravino has said in multiple interviews. “We have always operated on the territory with a theater that goes outside conventional spaces.” This is not a marketing language.
Over nearly three decades, the company has staged performances in cemeteries — drawing from Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology — on trains, in church basements, and, in one of their most theatrically audacious gestures, on the bell tower of the church of San Severino, some forty-five meters above the streets of San Severo.
That bell tower production, staged in 2011 to mark the 150th anniversary of Italian national unification, is worth pausing over. The play concerned a carbonaro priest — a revolutionary cleric of the nineteenth century — and the audience was physically escorted to the top of the tower to watch it.
“To judge history,” Gravino explained at the time, “you have to look at it from above.” The altitude was not a gimmick. It was a dramaturgy.
The height placed the spectator in an elevated, almost juridical position vis-à-vis the past — surveying the flat table of the Capitanata plain, the city below, the weight of a century and a half. The tower was not the backdrop. It was the argument.
Then, in 2016, Foyer ’97 opened Teatro Cantina — the ‘Cellar Theater’ — in a restored underground space in San Severo, described by the company as a cultural outpost that “starts from below.”
The cellar hosted theater, music, and food events, and was built on an explicit philosophy of cultural descent: going underground not as metaphor, but as method.
The cellar hosted theater, music, and food events, and was built on an explicit philosophy of cultural descent: going underground not as metaphor, but as method. Community, the company seemed to insist, is found in depth, not altitude. Both gestures were necessary.
Read together, the bell tower, the cellar, and now the newsstand describe a theatrical axis that is literally vertical.
The company has made work at approximately forty-five meters above ground, at street level, and below it. This is not a coincidence. It is a coherent — if never formally theorized — poetics of place.
The newsstand as dramaturgical device
What Francesco Gravino and Foyer ’97 have built across these three decades is what we might usefully term a “vertical proximity dramaturgy”: a practice of theater that operates along the full spatial axis of urban life — from subterranean to aerial — while maintaining an insistence on closeness, on the irreducible fact of two or more bodies sharing a single air.
The Teatro Edicola is its purest expression yet, because the space itself allows no distance of any kind.
He remembers going there as a child to buy trading cards, and returning as an adult, drawn back by the sociability of the newsstand keeper — a figure who, across Italian urban culture, has traditionally served as neighborhood anchor, information exchange, and informal archive.
The newsstand on via Tondi had been shuttered for five or six years when Gravino began thinking about it. He remembers going there as a child to buy trading cards, and returning as an adult, drawn back by the sociability of the newsstand keeper — a figure who, across Italian urban culture, has traditionally served as neighborhood anchor, information exchange, and informal archive.
In its abandonment, the kiosk embodied a specific kind of civic loss: the death of a hyper-local, bodily information hub in favor of digital abstraction. By converting it into a theater, Gravino performed an act of semantic inversion: from a place where one reads about stories to a place where one inhabits them.
“It used to represent the diffusion of news, of knowledge,” he told Famiglia Cristiana earlier this month. “Now it evolves that concept: it’s no longer reading stories, but living them in first person.”
The description echoes, perhaps unwittingly, the theoretical vocabulary of relational aesthetics. Nicolas Bourriaud, writing in the late 1990s, argued that the most significant art of the contemporary moment was not object-based but encounter-based — work that “takes as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context.”
A newsstand that produces six-person, fifteen-minute encounters with Chekhov, night after night, in a city of eighty thousand people in southern Italy, is, by any measure, relational art at its most literal.
Site-specific, but differently
The theoretical tradition of site-specific theater is well established, and it is worth placing Foyer ’97‘s work in dialogue with it even as we recognize how the company departs from its canonical forms. Richard Schechner’s environmental theater, as articulated in his landmark 1968 essay, insisted on the abolition of fixed audience-performer geography: “The total space is the theatre; the audience and the performers share the same space.”
Michael Kirby extended this thinking toward what he called “the landscape of performance,” in which the environment itself becomes co-author of the event. More recent scholars — Fiona Wilkie, Mike Pearson, Gareth White — have refined site-specific practice into a spectrum ranging from “found” to “made” sites, from work that merely inhabits a location to work that cannot exist without it.
Foyer ’97 operates at the sharpest end of that spectrum. The bell tower does not merely provide an unusual vantage point; it activates a specific historical and civic memory that no theater building could replicate.
The Teatro Cantina does not simply offer an intimate space; its subterranean quality — its literalness as underground — charges everything performed within it with a meaning that a basement theater at a university cannot produce. And the newsstand is not a quirky alternative venue.
It is, as Gravino said, “the perfect symbol: a place that suddenly transforms into a stage. From a space of news to a space of emotions.” The frame of the kiosk — its glass walls, its metal skeleton, its visibility from the street — turns every performance into something simultaneously interior and exposed, private and theatrical in the old Greek sense: “theaomai”, to look at, to be a spectator of.
What distinguishes Foyer ’97 from the canonical European tradition of site-specific performance — the promenade work of Welfare State International, say, or the durational inhabitations of Rimini Protokoll — is precisely its grounding in what Italians call “teatro di prossimità”: proximity theater, or, more literally, “nearby theater”.
The work does not travel to spectacular or unusual sites. It identifies the abandoned, the forgotten, and the marginal within its own community and restores them to function.
The emphasis is not on the exotic or the monumental, but on the municipal and the discarded. A newsstand. A cellar. A church tower that most residents of San Severo have never climbed.
This matters because it positions the company’s practice within a specific southern Italian context of cultural precarity. San Severo is not a town that receives substantial state support for the arts.
It is a town, like hundreds of mid-size Italian municipalities, where the principal threats to cultural life are not commercial dilution but simple abandonment: the slow disappearance of the institutions — the café, the square, the newsstand — that constitute the grammar of collective life.
Foyer ’97’s interventions in these spaces are not only aesthetic acts. They are civic ones. They argue, quietly and insistently, that culture is not produced in dedicated buildings for dedicated audiences but in the fabric of everyday geography, available to anyone who stops walking long enough to notice.
The axis of collective memory
There is something philosophically precise about the vertical structure of this body of work that deserves more attention than it has so far received. To map it: the bell tower, at forty-five meters, is a site of historical perspective — the place from which one surveys, judges, and contextualizes.
The street-level newsstand is the site of the present, of the encounter, of news — and now of the monologue, the body, the fleeting emotion. The cellar, underground, is the site of the foundational, the repressed, the forgotten origins of community.
Together, these three registers — historical sky, contemporary pavement, chthonic depth — describe something close to a complete phenomenology of collective memory.
It is tempting to reach for Bachelard here — for the vertical axis of The Poetics of Space, in which attics house memory and aspiration while cellars harbor the unconscious and the ancestral. Bachelard writes that “our house is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word.”
Foyer ’97 seems to operate on an analogous principle at the scale of the city: the urban landscape as a house whose rooms are distributed vertically across its terrain, each carrying a distinct psychic charge.
Foyer ’97 seems to operate on an analogous principle at the scale of the city: the urban landscape as a house whose rooms are distributed vertically across its terrain, each carrying a distinct psychic charge. To make theater in all three registers is to make theater of the whole city — not as backdrop, but as text.
Gravino himself does not articulate this in theoretical terms. He is a practitioner, not a theorist. When he talks about his Teatro Edicola, he talks about the actor’s breath being audible, about the impossibility of pretending in a space that small, about spectators “exiting with eyes that were moist.”
When he talks about the bell tower, he talks about what it means for someone who has lived their whole life in a big town to see it, for the first time, from above.
These are practical observations, empirical notes about what proximity and altitude do to the relation between performer and public. But they accumulate into something like a poetics, even if the practitioner himself would resist the word.
A format for export — and a commitment to stay
The “Theater newsstand” has already attracted national attention in Italy, covered by ANSA Brasil, Rai News, Corriere della Sera, Il Foglio, Repubblica, Avvenire, Il Fatto Quotidiano, Esquire Italy, and a range of regional press outlets.
The company has been contacted about replicating the format in a disused newsstand in the Testaccio neighborhood of Rome; colleagues in Massafra have expressed interest; there is talk of bringing the project to the festivals at Santarcangelo and Todi.
Gravino has mentioned the possibility of a Guinness World Records application for world’s smallest theater — six seats — which would formalize the claim that hundreds of passersby on via Tondi have already, in their own way, verified.
But what strikes me most in Gravino’s accounts is not the exportability of the format but his repeated insistence on remaining.
“The project was born in San Severo,” he told Famiglia Cristiana, “and I connect it to a choice: not to abandon your own land.”
In the landscape of contemporary Italian theater, where talent migration toward Rome, Milan and abroad is structural and almost inevitable, this is not a trivial statement. It is, in its quiet way, as radical as anything the Teatro Edicola‘s architecture proposes.
To make “theater of proximity” — theater that requires the specific abandoned newsstand on a specific street in a specific town — is to make theater that cannot, by definition, be made somewhere else.
It is theater that resists the mobility of the contemporary art market, that refuses the logic of the touring production, that insists on the irreplaceable texture of a particular place and the particular community that has grown around it.
In this sense, Foyer ’97‘s work is not only a poetics of space. It is a politics of rootedness.
For the broader international theater community, the lesson of Francesco Gravino’s Foyer ’97 is perhaps this: the most radical spatial gestures are not always the largest.
The most transformative site-specific work is not always the most spectacular. Sometimes it is six chairs in a dead newsstand, on a weekday morning, in a town most of us cannot find on a map, where an actor performs Chekhov to a group of strangers who will carry something of that quarter-hour for the rest of their lives.
The space is barely large enough to hold a secret. Which is precisely why, when the door closes, everything in it becomes one.
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Foyer ’97 Teatro was founded in San Severo, Puglia, southern Italy in 1997 by Francesco Gravino, who serves as its artistic director and principal actor. The “Teatro Edicola” premiered on March 27, 2026, World Theatre Day, at via Tondi, San Severo. The “Teatro Cantina” opened in 2016 at via Cristoforo Colombo, 18, San Severo. The company is celebrating its thirtieth anniversary in 2027.
Luciano Magaldi Sardella, an international undergraduate student from Abu Dhabi’s CNN Academy Hub.