Church of San Teonisto

The church of San Teonisto, in the historic center of Treviso, is a place of culture, dedicated in particular to music, and is part, together with the Bomben and Caotorta palaces, Ca' Scarpa and the Luisa and Gaetano Cozzi house, of the cultural spaces in which the activity of the Benetton Studies Research Foundation is based on.

The complex restoration of the church, completed at the end of 2017 and entrusted to the architect Tobia Scarpa, has returned a renewed architecture, but capable of recounting the signs of the past of a place with a long and troubled history. The church, built starting in 1434 by the Benedictine nuns, was de-owned and depleted of important pictorial works in the Napoleonic era, seriously damaged by the bombings of 1944, was finally deconsecrated and used for different uses and managed by the Municipality of Treviso until its acquisition, in 2010, by Luciano Benetton.

The new functional needs of the church found a solution in the creation of two foldaway reclining stands, which, when lowered, allow for a completely free space to host temporary exhibitions; when raised, they allow the room to be used as a music room and auditorium.

In 2018, the architectural-structural intervention was completed by the restoration and repositioning of almost all the original pictorial works, thanks to a thirty-year agreement between the Benetton Foundation and the Municipality of Treviso, which kept the canvases in the Museum's collections Civic, after its removal following the bombings.

Between the end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023 the church was the protagonist of a new phase of technical adaptation works and the restoration of the tympanum on the facade, as well as another important cultural operation: the acquisition of three new canvases , commissioned from the Bosnian artist Safet Zec, to complete the artistic cycle where it had not been possible to recover the original paintings.

Ph. credit Corrado Piccoli