January 31, 1736 - Filippo Juvarra, (in Spain Felipe Juvara), (March 7, 1678 - January 31, 1736) was an Italian architect and scene designer with a cosmopolitan outlook. Juvarra was born in Messina to a family of goldsmiths and engravers. After formative apprentice years with his family in Sicily, where he designed Messina's festive settings for the coronation of Philip V of Spain and Sicily (1705), Juvarra moved to Rome in 1704; there he studied architecture with Carlo and Francesco Fontana.The first phase of his independent career was occupied with designs for ceremonies and celebrations and especially with designs for theaters, in which he created a new type of theatrical space of virtuoso illusionism to supplant the rigorous architectural head-on perspectives inherited from the 16th century. He also designed theatrical machines and mechanisms, at Teatro S. Bartolomeo, Naples (1706), and at the established Teatro Capranica, Rome (1713). He worked as well in the capacity of a scene-designer for private theatres, in particular for the small theater at Palazzo della Cancelleria of Cardinal Ottoboni (1709) and a small theater for the Queen of Poland at Palazzo Zuccari, both extremely prominent commissions. In 1713 a theater project took him to Genoa.