Low-cost housing for Venice’s working families, still doing exactly that a century later — laundry lines and all, on the square named for a First World War battlefield.
At a glance
This corner block of flats over shuttered ground-floor shops is one of the affordable housing buildings that the Istituto per le Case Popolari (IACP) raised around Campo Monte Grappa in 1925, as Sant’Elena’s new quarter filled out beyond its grander avenue-front palazzi. It was designed by engineer and architect Francesco Marsich, who worked repeatedly for the IACP in this period.
Key facts
- Architect: Francesco Marsich, engineer and architect
- Built: 1925
- Commissioned by: the Istituto per le Case Popolari (IACP), Venice’s public housing authority
- Location: Campo Monte Grappa, Sant’Elena, Venice
- Square name: Monte Grappa, like many street names on Sant’Elena, commemorates a First World War battlefield — the mountain massif where Italian forces held the line in 1917–18
- GPS: 45.42846, 12.36069 · Open in Google Maps
History
Alongside the more ornamental villas and palazzi that architects like the Torres brothers designed for Sant’Elena’s avenues, the new quarter also needed housing its working residents could actually afford. That task fell largely to the Istituto per le Case Popolari, Venice’s public housing body, which commissioned engineer Francesco Marsich to design blocks of flats around Campo Monte Grappa in 1925 — part of a wider programme that, across the island, eventually delivered public and semi-public housing for railway workers, state employees and other cooperatives alongside the IACP’s own tenants.
A century on, the corner block still functions as ordinary residential housing: shutters down over the ground-floor shops, washing strung between the upper-floor windows on any dry morning — a working-class square that has kept working, in a quarter better known today for its parkland and its water-view apartments.
Sources
- Conoscere Venezia, Case dello IACP e di altri enti pubblici a Sant’Elena, già quartiere “Vittorio Emanuele III” — conoscerevenezia.it: Francesco Marsich’s 1925 design for the IACP housing around Campo Monte Grappa, and the wider public-housing programme on the island
- On-site street sign, verified from the contributed photograph: “Campo Monte Grappa”
- Coordinates cross-checked against OpenStreetMap Nominatim for Campo Monte Grappa
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See this place and what’s around it →Record researched and written by Carla Szathvary for Cultural Heritage Online, 2026.
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