The Fake Ancient Theater in Italy That Fooled Ticket Buyers for a Decade

Marketed as a Neolithic and Roman find, the site was in fact assembled with concrete and grouted stone blocks.

A man in northern Italy has been sent to prison after Italy’s highest court gave final confirmation to his conviction for illegally constructing a fake ancient theater and presenting it to the public as a genuine archaeological site, charging visitors an entrance fee of up to 40 euros.

The structure still stands in Arcugnano, in the province of Vicenza. It consists of tiered stone seating built from stacked stones that were worked to look ancient. The columns are fake too, made of concrete, along with plaster statues and an artificial small lake dug beneath the tiers in the arena area.

The site was built in 2016 on a plot of roughly 5,000 square meters and was marketed under the name “Anfiteatro marittimo berico Porto degli Angeli,” presented as an extraordinary archaeological find containing Neolithic, Roman and Greek era artifacts. Promotional material at the time described it as an authentic, millennia-old archaeological gem of the pre-Roman Veneto territory, claiming events, concerts, performances and conferences were held there. Technically the name itself was misleading, since true amphitheaters have an elliptical plan like the Colosseum, while structures with a semicircular plan are correctly called theaters.

Already in 2016, the Vicenza prosecutor’s office opened an investigation after a report from the municipality of Arcugnano. Carabinieri established that the theater was in fact a modern construction, built without the required permits on a hill protected under landscape conservation rules. The area was seized and its operator, 69-year-old Franco Malosso, who went by the name Franco Alessandro Molosso Maltarel von Rosenfranz, was charged with illegal construction and forgery of artworks.

The Vicenza court convicted Malosso in both the first and second instance. In 2021 his lawyers appealed to the Court of Cassation, arguing that the building and environmental offenses had exceeded the statute of limitations, disputing the validity of the landscape protection constraint, and contesting the sentence as excessive. His defense also argued that the falsification was so crude it could not have fooled anyone. Five years later, the Cassation Court rejected the appeal and upheld the second-instance sentence of two years and four months in prison.

Reviews left on Google Maps over the years show a similar split in opinion. Some visitors described it as an enchanting, almost magical spot surrounded by nature, praising the hospitality of the staff. Others were far less flattering, pointing out that the ruins were fake and the construction unauthorized, and noting that the Veneto Archaeological Superintendence and the Carabinieri’s cultural heritage unit had already flagged problems with the site. The owner’s reply to one such review was, to put it mildly, unexpected: a sprawling, conspiracy-laden rant leveling unsubstantiated accusations against named officials, academics and reviewers, reading less like a rebuttal and more like supporting evidence for everything the review had said.

The Vicenza court’s original ruling had also ordered Malosso to compensate the municipality for damages and to demolish the theater and other unauthorized structures, restoring the hill to its original condition. In 2017 the then mayor of Arcugnano, Paolo Pellizzari, warned that if Malosso refused to restore the site, the costs of doing so could end up falling on the municipality. Malosso has still not removed the theater.

Featured image: Facebook
Source: Il Post