Town Hall and Augusteo Theatre

The Town Hall in Salerno is an imposing building that is located between Via Roma and Lungomare Trieste, developed over a surface of about five thousand square metres on four floors with a portico on the main side and a central courtyard which is almost completely occupied by a main stair with two flights. The "modernised classical" style of its main features and areas gives this building a works carried out in the city during Fascism.
It was inaugurated on April 12th 1936, but its activity began only some years later. The project and its execution are the work of a famous Neapolitan engineer Camillo Guerra, who was the first municipal engineer during those years. Adjacent to the reception room was the Room of Commissions, today called Sala della Giunta (Town-council's room), on the opposite side, there was the Room of the Council, today Sala del Gonfalone (Gonfalon's Room), covere by a lacunar ceiling of reinforced concrete and glass tiles. Then there were the Parlour and the Podestà's, Vice-Podestà's and General Secretary's Cabinets.
The Municipal officies were foreseen and built in a part of the mezzanine, on the first and on the whole second floor. The ground floor is half occupied by the cinema-theatre Augusteo: a large room with 1600 seats, recently restored and opened to the public after many years of inactivity. The structure was characterised by a vault of reinforced concrete and light is diffused from its lacunares.
In the lunettes of the windows on the front there was a group of bronze statues, sculptured by the artist Gaetano Chianomonte, later the statues were removed and only recently have been restored and put in the ambulatory on the first floor. The stair in the courtyard was relieved of the buffers of the flights and substituted with slender arches and even a ceiling of reinforced concrete and glass tiles with a reduced curve was arranged but it was never carried out due to the opposition of the building commission.
From the courtyard the main stair led to the ambulatory on the first floor, occupied largely by the entertainment room of the Podestà. The most important place was the reception room, in which today the town council takes place. In it in 1944 there was the first meeting of the Council of Ministers of the Government of national unity. Today the room is called Salone dei Marmi (Marbles' room), because it is covered almost completely by very beautiful polychromatic marbles, with many-coloured gold, red and blue mosaics (the colours of Salerno Municipality), opaline lamps, which imitate stylizations of fountains and the whole was surmounted by the pictorial cycle of the local artist Pasquale Avallone.

Address: Via Roma, 1 
Telephone: +39 089 662211 

I Bronzi di Chiaromonte - Particolari