Ca’ Vendramin Reclamation Museum Site Features

The building is a long brick industrial hall with tall arched windows -- the standard architecture of an early twentieth-century pumping station, and handsome in the way such buildings usually are.

Inside, the machinery remains in situ: the engines, the pumps and the drive gear, laid out as they worked. This is the museum's real quality -- it is a plant rather than a display about plants.

The intake and outfall channels outside are part of the structure, and show the basic logic: water collected from below sea level, lifted, and discharged into the river above.

Around it are the ancillary buildings of the plant -- workshops, houses for the staff who had to live on site -- which is how these stations were always built.

The engine hall

The pumps and engines still in place. The reason to come.

The channels

The intake and discharge works outside, which make the whole hydraulic idea legible in about a minute.

The 1951 flood

The museum covers the disaster that broke this system and emptied the Polesine, which is the human half of the story.

The setting

An industrial monument standing alone in an entirely flat, empty landscape below sea level.