The Building That Waited
For much of the twentieth century, the building on Strada Provinciale in Cittanova did what prisons do. It held people. It had cells, corridors, bars, a function built entirely to keep people in. Toward the end of the 1980s, that function ended. The prison closed. What remained wasn't exactly a ruin, but rather a building with nothing left to do, sitting on the edge of a small Calabrian town while the city moved on without it.
It remained that way for decades. Not abandoned, simply unused. A structure built for confinement, waiting for someone to decide it could be used for something else.
In 2004, a young man named Walter Cordopatri left Calabria to become an actor because there was no place in the region to train as an actor. The only nearby academy, in Palmi, was closing. The only viable option was Rome, so he left, auditioned at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia despite being advised not to try, and trained there for three years. In 2016, he returned home. The void he had left ten years earlier was still there. In Calabria, and throughout Southern Italy as a whole, there was still no accredited academic path to acting, and the new generation of young people with his same ambitions were about to hit the same wall.
He decided not to leave that void as a legacy to someone else. On May 15, 2016, he founded the Calabria School of Acting. It needed a place to launch it, and the Municipality of Cittanova had a space it no longer used. On January 21, 2017, the School opened inside the old prison, and the building finally found its second purpose. The cells became classrooms. The corridors built to separate people became passages that students walked together. A courtyard designed for supervised air became a stage. The bars didn't disappear, but they ceased to mean anything, because no one inside them was kept away from anything anymore. They were trained to achieve it.
Nine years later, on the other side of Calabria, in Palmi, a second building underwent the same transformation. Villa Repaci had been the home of writer Leonida Repaci and his wife Albertina and, like the prison in Cittanova, had spent years largely closed, known more for what it had been than for what happened inside. In July 2025, it reopened as La Raffica, a new cultural hub for the area, and the SRC helped bring it back to life. It wasn't a coincidence, but rather the repetition of a pattern. Calabria continued to preserve buildings with a real history and no current use, and the SRC continued to find reasons to return and turn the lights back on.
This is the shape of a story worth telling. Not the career of one man, though Cordopatri remains the person who keeps finding the next abandoned room to reclaim. It's a region that had stopped expecting its old buildings to matter again, and a school that for ten years has proven otherwise, first inside a prison in Cittanova, then inside a writer's home in Palmi. Ten years later, the teaching staff assembled by Cordopatri numbers twenty-six active professionals, his students have sat on the jury of the Giffoni Film Festival every year since 2017, have appeared in Disney+ productions and RAI programs, welcomed a delegation from KNUTKiT Kyiv in 2025, and in 2026 hosted Ubu Prize-winning director Danio Manfredini for an intensive workshop, on the same stage that was once a guarded courtyard.
The building on Strada Provinciale in Cittanova still recalls what it was intended for. It just isn't used for that purpose anymore.