The last survivor of five Vetrocoke cooling towers at Porto Marghera stands 60 metres tall and now holds a museum of more than 7,000 objects from the industrial history of the Venice lagoon — the only industrial water-cooling tower in Italy and Europe recovered and reused in this way.
At a glance
Rising from the canal-side flatlands of Porto Marghera, the Venezia Heritage Tower is a 60-metre reinforced-concrete hyperboloid structure completed in 1938 as one of five cooling towers serving the Vetrocoke chemical plant. The shell narrows to about 40 metres at its waist before flaring again — a form chosen because it cooled large volumes of water with a fraction of the material a straight tower would need, a novelty in reinforced concrete at a time when such towers were usually built in timber. Reinvented from the 1990s as a cultural venue, it now houses the Museo delle Imprese (Museum of Enterprise), with more than 7,000 objects — patents, products, packaging, advertising posters and machinery — documenting Porto Marghera’s century of industrial production.
History
Porto Marghera was founded as a planned industrial port between 1917 and 1921 to relieve Venice’s historic centre from the noise and pollution of manufacturing, on reclaimed lagoon land linked by a grid of canals, berths and factory plots. By the 1930s it was one of the largest petrochemical and industrial zones in Italy. The Vetrocoke plant, expanded with financing tied to Senator Giovanni Agnelli and to Count Giuseppe Volpi di Misurata — the financier who had driven Porto Marghera’s original development and later founded SADE — needed a complex of cooling towers to manage the heat from its chemical processes. Five hyperboloid towers went up in 1938 to cool roughly 800,000 cubic metres of water a year. By the 1980s all five had gone out of use as the chemical processes changed; four were demolished, and the surviving tower was catalogued as an industrial monument and protected from the same fate.
Its second life began in 1996, when the derelict tower caught the attention of the architect Gianni Cibin. The entrepreneur Gianni Sottana — whose name the tower’s street, Corso Gianni Sottana, now carries — led the project that turned it into a cultural venue and business museum, opened to the public in the years that followed. By 2024 it was drawing some 9,000 visitors a year, roughly three times its earlier attendance, and hosting around 30 events, double the number of a few years before.
What you see
From the canal, the tower reads as a pure geometric abstraction: the hyperboloid shell narrows to a waist at mid-height before flaring outward again at the base, a form that generates its own sense of movement without ornament. At the base, the original intake louvers have been glazed to let light into the first exhibition level. Inside, the circular floor plates form concentric display rings, with industrial objects arranged thematically rather than chronologically — product lines from the chemical, aluminium and glass industries alongside workers’ photographs and documents. An observation platform near the top keeps the raw concrete balustrade of the original structure, with a 360-degree view across the lagoon, the port, and on clear days the Dolomite foothills.
Cultural significance
The Venezia Heritage Tower is one of the most significant industrial heritage conversions in the Veneto, and by its own account the only industrial water-cooling tower in Italy and Europe to have been recovered and reused this way. Porto Marghera has long been a contested site in Italian public discourse — simultaneously the engine of Venice’s twentieth-century economy and a major source of pollution to the lagoon ecosystem — and the museum inside the tower holds that tension openly rather than resolving it, treating the industrial archive as a resource for understanding the site in full.
Key facts
- Address: Corso Gianni Sottana, Marghera, Venice
- Original construction: 1938 (Vetrocoke cooling towers), financing tied to Giovanni Agnelli and Giuseppe Volpi di Misurata
- Cultural reconversion: begun 1996 (architect Gianni Cibin), led by entrepreneur Gianni Sottana
- Tower height: 60 m, narrowing to about 40 m at the waist (hyperboloid reinforced concrete)
- Original cooling capacity: approx. 800,000 m³ of water per year
- Collection: 7,000+ objects — patents, products, advertising posters, industrial machinery
- 2024 attendance: approx. 9,000 visitors, around 30 events
- Distinction: the only industrial water-cooling tower in Italy and Europe recovered as a museum of enterprise
Practical information
- Access: by appointment for groups and events; check the official website for public opening days
- Photography: permitted throughout; the observation platform is a popular photography destination
- Nearest services: bars and cafes in Marghera town centre, 1 km east
Getting there
Porto Marghera is on the mainland, a few kilometres west of Venice Santa Lucia station. By train, alight at Venezia Mestre; the tower is reachable from there by local bus or a short taxi ride along Corso Gianni Sottana. By car, exit the A4 motorway at Venezia Est and follow signs for Porto Marghera; parking is available on-site. Coordinates: 45.4653° N, 12.2393° E. The site is not served by ACTV water buses.
See the place
Nearby
- M9 — Museo del '900: Mestre’s museum of twentieth-century Italian life, a few kilometres east
- Venezia Santa Lucia: the historic city centre, reachable by train or across the Ponte della Libertà
Sources & resources
- Venezia Heritage Tower (official website)
- 1600 Venezia — history of the cooling tower — height, construction, Agnelli/Volpi financing, Sottana and Cibin, 1996 reconversion
- Metropolitano.it — height, 1938 date, collection size, 2024 attendance figures
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