New Actualities for Mediterranean Ancient Theaters. The ATHENA Project Lesson

Ancient Theatres are one of the most extraordinary legacies that past civilizations have left us. From a cultural standpoint, this is because of the importance that these monuments had in the social life of each past community; from the environmental standpoint, because of the enormous skill that went into controlling the territorial and urban impact of these ‘structures’; and finally, from a ‘technological’ and functional standpoint, because of the excellence of their internal distribution patterns and acoustics, which is hard to equal even today. In this paper, we present the activities of the Ancient Theatres Enhancement for New Actualities (Athena) Project funded by the EU within the Euromed Heritage IV Program. A project addressing six famous sites on both shores of the Mediterranean (Mérida, Petra, Jerash, Carthage, Cherchell, and Siracusa) providing a special focus on the documentation, reading, representation, analysis and also some innovative ways to involve the general public through user–friendly instruments and outputs.