Ca’ Vendramin Reclamation Museum Historical Timeline

Origins

The marshes behind the delta were drained progressively from the eighteenth century, but the low ground could not be kept dry by gravity: water had to be lifted mechanically back into the river.

Turning points

Ca' Vendramin opened in 1903, built to drain a very large area of the delta -- one of the biggest reclamation plants of its day, and the engineering centrepiece of the whole scheme.

Influential people

The station ran on steam and later on electricity, and its work made possible the farmland, the rice fields and the villages that occupy the delta today.

Cultural evolution

The 1951 flood broke the embankments across the Polesine, drowning around a hundred people and displacing some 180,000. Ca' Vendramin is inseparable from that memory: it is the machinery of a system whose failure emptied a province.

Present-day significance

The plant was decommissioned in 1969 when newer stations took over, and was later restored as the Museo Regionale della Bonifica.