Not a screen that turns a place into a cinema. Not just showing movies. But a complex of things that have to do with the atmosphere, the sociability, the lights that fade slowly, things that are in balance and make up a magic. This is the sense of the petition launched by Leonardo Bigazzi from Lo Screen dell’Arte on Change.org – and which at 5pm yesterday counted 1,500 subscribers including many intellectuals, artists, professionals from the world of cinema and culture in general, from the former consul Isabelle Mallez to French Drusilla Foer – for all our will for the Giunti-Odeon project which announced the opening of a bookshop and a restaurant bar in the cinemas of Piazza Strozzi. The appeal addressed to regional and city politics, to superintendent Pessina (whose opinion on the project is still awaited), to the owner of the cinema Gloria Germani and to the CEO of Giunti, Martino Montanarini. Both of the latter have given ample reassurances to the Florentine courier that the Odeon will remain cinema. But, as Bigazzi explains, when asked about what the audience and the armchairs will be like, they never answered clearly and never showed the project, giving only reassurance on the presence of the screen. But precisely the screen is not enough to make cinema. Hence the very concrete expectation of being to witness (the works in, the new one at the end of the year) to an upheaval of one of the most beautiful and important places in the city.

The appeal is not a controversy against people we have esteem and trust in reference to both the institutions and the private subjects involved. But a love letter for the Odeon. Above all – the signatories specify – the request to see the project to remove any doubts about the future of a beautiful and historic room and the aspiration to create an open discussion on the project. Theirs is a cry of alarm for a potential risk: if you say you want to make a restaurant and a bookshop in a multifunctional place without separation between the arts as Montanarini says, the reassurance that films will continue to be shown does not mean that it remains a cinema, yes.and upset the environment and transform the audience into removable seats, do something else, but not a cinema, and every time you start a project you never know where it leads.