Former Italian ambassador to Albania Paolo Foresti condemned the demolition of the National Theater. In an interview with ABC News, Foresti said that if the world acted in the same way as the Albanian government did, “we would have no more history.”
He called the demolition of the National Theater a “crime against architecture.” High sensitivity in the face of the demolition, Foresti said, exists because the building did not belong to one nation alone, but to all of humanity. He said that other architectural works had also suffered “criminal” ends in Albania.
With regards to Prime Minister Edi Rama’s proposal to rebuild the Theater based on the original project, but in a different location, the ambassador asserted that “a copy remains a copy.”
