Often the value of projects is measured through a single indicator: the price. However, there are interesting, fascinating, engaging projects, in which the value is given by the complexity, the need to be creative, the constraints, the history, the context, the quality of the client.
This is the Cinema Modernissimo project in the center of Bologna.
In 1915 Modernissimo was inaugurated in Bologna, a multifunctional building symbol of the modern era that fits into the medieval heart of a city, sensing what its future will be, what its inhabitants will do and what they will want.
We are on the ground floor – or rather, underground – of Palazzo Ronzani, on the corner between Piazza Re Enzo and via Rizzoli – the road artery which, starting from the two towers, reaches Piazza Maggiore.
Palazzo Ronzani bears the signature of the architect and set designer Gualtiero Pontoni, commissioned in turn by Alessandro Ronzani, well-known industrialist of Birra Ronzani, and houses a hotel, warehouses, shops, clubs and, in the basement, the Gran Caffè Modernissimo. It is a cinema-theatre which, from being a novelty in construction due to its underground arrangement, becomes a symbol of the musical and cinematographic culture of Bologna.
The building is one of the first examples of reinforced concrete work in Bologna. The portion relating to the Cinema has two underground levels of considerable height. The main room consisting of the stalls and a gallery level is entirely underground.
In the 1950s and 1960s, there were two cinema halls: the underground Cinema Modernissimo and the Central Cinema. Transformed into Cinema Arcobaleno, it remained in business until it closed in 2007.
In July 2014, the Municipality of Bologna, the Cineteca di Bologna Foundation and Emmegi Cinema srl, owner of the building, signed the agreement for the reopening of the Cinema Modernissimo.
On 21 November 2023, more than a century after the first inauguration and fifteen years after its closure, the Modernissimo returns to the urban and cultural geography of Bologna with a very important cultural program and with great guests from the world of cinema.
Proud to have participated in this beautiful project in which skills in structural engineering were compared with history, art, the importance of functions; engineering that doesn’t just speak the language of numbers.
After the set designer Gualtiero Pontoni, another well-known set designer Giancarlo Basili designed this venue, giving it a truly unique charm and atmosphere.
