Built in 1905 for the sale of poultry, and still standing: an open brick arcade in a market square, listed by the state and used, most days, as a car park.
At a glance
- What — an open market loggia in brick and stone, known locally as the former poultry market
- Where — Largo San Giorgio, Noale, province of Venice
- Built — 1905
- Status — catalogued in the national heritage inventory; public property, protected by the Soprintendenza for the metropolitan city of Venice
History
Noale is a walled town on the plain between Padua, Treviso and Venice, built around the moated rocca of the Tempesta family and shaped, for centuries, by its markets. Largo San Giorgio lies just outside the old core, and the loggia was raised there in 1905 to house one specific trade: the sale of live poultry, which needed shade, air and a floor that could be washed.
The national heritage catalogue records the building as Loggetta, ex mercato del pollame, dated 1905, in public ownership and under the protection of the Soprintendenza for archaeology, fine arts and landscape of the metropolitan city of Venice. The catalogue entry, compiled in 2005 and revised in 2017, does not name a designer — which is normal for a municipal market building of this size and date, usually the work of the town’s own technical office.
What you see
The building is a free-standing rectangular shelter, entirely open: two long arcades of round-headed brick arches, carried on slim stone columns with simple carved capitals, closed at the ends by heavier brick piers with a single wide arch. The brick is left exposed and the arches are picked out in radiating voussoirs; a band of small corbels runs under the eaves on the gable ends, and a low-pitched roof of curved tiles covers the whole with a generous overhang.
The vocabulary is deliberately medievalising — the round arch, the corbel table, the bare brick — which around 1900 was the normal register in the Veneto for a civic building meant to look as though it had always been there. The detail, though, is thin and repetitive in the way that period utility building is: the columns are standard, the capitals are shallow, and the whole thing was assembled quickly and cheaply for a working purpose. Along one side, small carved roundels are set between the arches.
Cultural significance
Covered market halls of this kind were built across northern Italy in the decades either side of 1900, and most of them are gone. They lost their trade first — live poultry stopped being sold in the open in the second half of the twentieth century — and then, having no obvious new use, they were cleared for traffic and parking. Noale kept its loggia and let the cars in underneath, which is not the most dignified afterlife but is the reason the structure survives at all.
Its interest is in the trade it names. Market buildings for a single commodity — grain, silk cocoons, fish, poultry — are the physical record of a local economy that no longer exists, and the specificity is the point: this is not a generic market, it is where the chickens were sold.
Practical information & getting there
Noale is about 25 km from both Venice and Padua, on the regional rail line from Venice to Bassano (station: Noale-Scorzè, then a short walk or bus into the town). The loggia stands in the open in Largo San Giorgio, a few minutes from the Rocca dei Tempesta and the arcaded main square; there is nothing to enter and no opening hours. Early morning is the only time the arcade is likely to be free of parked cars.
Sources & resources
- Catalogo generale dei Beni Culturali — Loggetta, ex mercato del pollame, Noale (VE): catalogue number 0500354028, dated 1905, public property, competent body the Soprintendenza of the metropolitan city of Venice.
- The description above was made from photographs taken on site by Stefano Vigolo in 2026.
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