Duilio Torres, the architect who laid out Sant’Elena’s masterplan in 1911 and kept building on the island for decades after, put up this square’s apartment block in 1931 — long before the square took the name of Marco Stringari, a partisan of the Second World War still two decades away.
At a glance
Duilio Torres (1882–1972) was the lead architect behind Sant’Elena’s transformation from marginal reclaimed land into a planned residential quarter, invited by the Comune of Venice in 1911 to design the island’s regulatory plan. This building on what is now Campo Marco Stringari, dated 1931, belongs to that long building campaign, decades before the square was named for a local partisan of the Resistance.
Key facts
- Architect: Duilio Torres (14 August 1882 – 28 June 1972)
- Built: 1931
- Torres’s role on Sant’Elena: commissioned in 1911 by the Comune of Venice to plan and build the island, a role he held for decades
- Square named for: Marco Stringari, a partisan of the Second World War
One architect, one island, four decades
Where much of Sant’Elena’s housing came out of the IACP’s public-housing programme under engineer Paolo Bertanza, Duilio Torres worked the island from a different angle: as its capogruppo planner from 1911, shaping the regulatory plan that turned reclaimed marshland into a residential district, and continuing to design buildings within it well into the 1930s. This apartment block dates from 1931, one of the later stages of a project Torres had begun twenty years earlier. Its square would only later be named for Marco Stringari, one of the partisans of the Venetian Resistance in the Second World War — a reminder that Sant’Elena’s street names layer two different conflicts, the First World War battle names of streets like Calle Coni Zugna and the later Resistance memory of squares like this one.
Getting there
Campo Marco Stringari is on Sant’Elena, a short walk from the Sant’Elena vaporetto stop.
Sources
- Wikipedia, “Duilio Torres” — on his 1911 commission to plan Sant’Elena.
- Treccani, Dizionario Biografico, “Torres, Duilio” — biographical dates.
- Stefano Vigolo, who photographed the building.
Find it on the map
See this place and what’s around it →Record researched and written by Stefano Vigolo for Cultural Heritage Online, 2026.
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