“Punta Corsara” is a three-year project of cultural entrepreneurship (2007-2010) launched by Fondazione Campania dei Festival for the Teatro Auditorium of Scampia. Marco Martinelli and Debora Pietrobono – who had served as the theater’s artistic director and organizational director respectively until 2009 – passed the project’s leadership to Emanuele Valenti and Marina Dammacco, who had been their assistants. Beginning in 2010, they had overseen a work group comprising Antonio Gatto, as technical director, Valeria Lama, as organizer, and fifteen teenagers who completed the three-year training program to become organizers, actors, and technicians. In 2010, the “corsair group” became an association to be able to manage the Auditorium in Scampia, built in the aftermath of the 1980 earthquake but never put to use. Punta Corsara was launched to turn the Auditorium into an art center for the neighborhood and the whole of the city. In 2009 and 2010 it hosted two theater seasons. 

Punta Corsara included a training program for performing art masters aimed at twenty grant holders aged 18-23. The training did not follow the traditional school model, but revolved around the encounter between participants and nationally-renowned masters, each with a different practice and artistic vision. “Fatto di cronaca di Raffaele Viviani a Scampia” [Raffaele Viviani’s News Story in Scampia] was the project’s first outcome, which saw Arturo Cirillo direct his own actors and the “corsair pupils” in their debut at Napoli Teatro Festival Italia 2009. 

In 2009, the Motus company was in residence at Scampia. After a meeting with the music groups of the area, it kicked off the fourth part of X (ics) “Racconti crudeli della giovinezza” [Cruel tales of Youth], a project on youths from urban slums. In 2010 Virgilio Sieni chose Punta Corsara as the setting of the special version of the Neapolitan show “Oro” [Gold], his work inspired by Lucretius’ De rerum natura on the ages of man.