The tall square-shaped tower which houses an expensive hydrogen-powered vertical furnace, an ambitious investment from the early 2000s, stands out from what remains of the surrounding countryside. In the courtyard the grass grows uncultivated, but the shed of the Ilnor metallurgical factory is still there: an area of 40 thousand square meters abandoned since the summer of 2017, on the road that leads from Mogliano to Scorzè, one of the busy roads that connect the provinces of Venice and Treviso.
The three months of permanent garrison, from April to July 2017, the gates blocked by the workers and the union flags hanging along the wire mesh surrounding the building, are now only a memory. During the protests, a mannequin in overalls had appeared at the main entrance, hanged under the company logo depicting the stylized lion of San Marco, while local politicians proposed mediations, hypothetical buyers and employment solutions.
But it did little to help: Ilnor, specialized in the production of rolled brass and copper strips, with a solid market in the automotive sector driven by exports, especially to Germany, closed in July 2017. Eredi Gnutti Metalli, the group industrialist who acquired the company founded by the Fasano family in 1961, in fact preferred to transfer all production to Brescia. The nearly 150 employees of the company, of which at least ninety workers employed on continuous shifts, were offered a year of layoffs, then, for those who wanted, the transfer.
“Nobody would have thought it would end like this”, says Mario Favaro, 57, at Ilnor since 1992. “I spent three months in Brescia. They wanted me to stay, but I said no, I have a family, what can I do? ”. As a precocious worker – he started working as a carpenter at 14 – Favaro recently managed to retire. The other colleagues, most of whom came from villages close to the Gardigiano hamlet where the company was based, did not go so well.
The shed is now for sale, it is one of the many industrial buildings emptied, disused, abandoned, signs of the history of a region, the Veneto, which thanks to industry has prospered for decades. The landscape in these parts is littered with factories and small industrial epics like that of Ilnor. In the region there are more than 92 thousand industrial buildings: of these over 11 thousand are empty, about twelve percent. Production areas are everywhere, even in the smallest villages, with an average of ten industrial zones per municipality. There is a factory for every 54 inhabitants. A building fabric that innervates almost the entire territory, and with which it is impossible not to reckon.
“After the Second World War, Veneto is one of the poorest regions in Italy, from which it emigrates”, explains Maria Chiara Tosi, professor of urban planning at the Iuav University of Venice. After the war, an important phase of industrialization began, particularly in the textile and petrochemical sectors. Over time, the large centers are then downsized and, also thanks to the skills acquired by the workers in the area, small and medium-sized factories are born that transform peasant society. Farmers become “metalworkers”, people who are divided between working in the fields and working in the factories, and the house-shed takes shape. Many of these activities, in fact, develop by enlarging the farm buildings close to the houses.
The main entrance to Ilnor, from which the historic company logo has been removed, June 30, 2022.
(Camilla Martini for L’Essenziale)
From the seventies the region began to regulate production, also with the aim of making it safe: “Veneto initiates an exaggerated expansion of industrial areas: in each municipality there is more than one production area and this leads to significant land consumption. Very often ecosystems, rivers, natural environments are not considered ”. One of the reasons why the Christian Democrats, ruling the region until the nineties, allowed this dispersion of factories and production areas, is political: after the demonstrations in 1968 and the great trade union demands of Porto Marghera in 1970, it was preferred to “spread “Workers avoiding large concentrations of people, and this to have greater social control, explains Tosi.
It is from there that the very rapid and chaotic economic and urban growth that overwhelms the territory, with a widespread and disorderly development, characterized by the lack of planning, starts. Since then, construction has never stopped: tall cranes and vast construction sites still characterize the Veneto landscape today, especially in the plains.
In recent years, large shopping centers and logistics warehouses have increased exponentially, with ever larger warehouses located above all in the vicinity of motorway junctions. The opening of new sections of roads, such as the Mestre bypass or the Pedemontana Veneta highway, now almost completed and which will cross the fragile hilly territories between the provinces of Vicenza and Treviso, therefore risks favoring the creation of new production areas with the consequent traffic of heavy vehicles.
Veneto is the second Italian region for land consumption after Lombardy, with almost twelve percent of the territory waterproofed, that is, covered with materials such as asphalt or concrete. The percentage reaches 20 if only the center is considered, ie excluding the mountains and the coast. In 2017, a regional law was approved for the “containment of land use”, criticized by many parties for the too many exemptions provided, especially in the construction and industry sectors. In the years that go through the three terms of the presidency of Luca Zaia (Lega), Veneto has become the first region for the increase of waterproofed territory.
“Around 2005 we had worked a lot on committees of citizens who opposed overbuilding,” recalls Francesco Vallerani, a geography professor at the Ca ‘Foscari University, who has been dealing with the drastic change of the Veneto landscape for almost twenty years. “Many of these no longer exist, out of exhaustion and the great frustration of how in vain their efforts were. Of the more than 280 committees we surveyed in the region, only a handful of them remained ”.
As construction continues, many buildings remain empty. The relocations, the 2008 crisis (which here hit heavily, leading to the suicide of dozens of entrepreneurs: according to the trade union association Cgia of Mestre there were about 50 in the three-year period 2009-2012), the changes in the economic so that many of these factories were abandoned. And this has led to the loss of professional skills, to the fraying of business networks and related industries that worked because they were connected, to the disintegration of those bonds of interdependence that for decades have supported the economic and social development of the region.
“At Ilnor we had a fairly high average age, around fifty, there were few young people”, explains Francesco Rizzante, 56, hired in 1990 and for a decade as a union delegate of Fiom. “Having worked there for a long time we had developed a certain professionalism. We were able to optimize production, work had become our life ”. With the aim of saving professional skills, relationships with suppliers and related companies, as well as jobs, in 2019 about fifteen workers who had been laid off tried to create a cooperative, to restart the agency. But the purchase costs of raw materials in this sector are very high, they can reach millions of euros, capital that the former workers did not have. The Ilnor reopening project is therefore wrecked.
The multiplication of empty spaces and new buildings is opposed by the vision of those who want to focus on the reuse of abandoned buildings. “The financial crisis between 2008 and 2013 actually slowed down land consumption, because there were no more financial surpluses to invest in warehouses or residential construction,” explains Vallerani. “The market stopped for a moment, even today it is possible to observe how much building material has remained unsold. There are not only abandoned factories, many warehouses have never been used. In part, however, this crisis has influenced the reconversion of the buildings ”.
In recent years, more and more recovery projects have been developed, which have allowed the redevelopment of former factories. Some examples are the industrial archeology building of Pagnossin, a ceramic factory in Quinto di Treviso founded in 1919, transformed into a pole dedicated to cycle tourism. Or Zephiro in Castelfranco Veneto, coworking and theatrical production site, housed in the spaces of a textile company closed since the eighties; in the same town there is Antiruggine, the concert hall opened by the cellist Mario Brunello in the disused shed of a blacksmith. In Schio, in the upper Vicenza area, since 2017 in the abandoned industrial complex of Lanerossi an art center, Fabbrica Alta, has come to life.
Entrepreneurs are also changing their perspective. Assindustria Veneto Centro, trade association of the provinces of Padua and Treviso, last March presented the Sheds OnOff project, a portal that, starting from the mapping of empty industrial buildings, aims to relate supply and demand with the intention of not consume new territory.
The tower of the Ilnor plant seen from the countryside of Gardigiano di Scorzè, province of Venice, 30 June 2022.
(Camilla Martini for L’Essenziale)
However, these are still isolated cases. In this region there is a strong contradiction between significant innovation and regeneration processes and the story of companies such as Ilnor, which close despite being in excellent health. “In February 2017, a few months before the closing, we had made the record of deliveries”, recalls Rizzante. “It is absurd that a company like ours, which lived almost exclusively on exports, would die in this way. We were a recognized brand throughout Europe. It is a contradiction especially in a historical moment in which everything is based on the electric “.
The ability to imagine a future for the Veneto also passes through these abandoned factories, traces of the unprocessed memory of its industrial history. What is most lacking is the ability of the regional and municipal administrations to direct and direct virtuous processes, making them a priority against overbuilding which seems unstoppable. What is needed, Maria Chiara Tosi observes, is an overall strategic vision, a broader direction: “We need a perspective that holds together the different levels: social, cultural, economic and environmental. Either they manage to move together or they all get into serious trouble ”.
The solutions will also come from the activities and functions that the today empty warehouses will be able to host in the coming years, activities that could retain the many graduates who are trained in the universities of the region. For some time the North East Foundation, a think tank linked to Confindustria, has sounded the alarm about the lack of skilled workers, due to the intertwining of the demographic decline with the exodus of young people, especially graduates who emigrate abroad or to other regions. “It’s all cultural capital that we throw away”, comments Tosi.
“The Veneto area is frightening today, from the point of view of pollution and environmental risks”, continues the urban planner. “And with the worsening of the climate crisis it will suffer more and more. We need a truly radical approach ”. For Tosi the main objectives are reforestation, the restoration of water environments and the de-waterproofing of the soil.
“We are talking about one of the richest regions in Italy, with great potential and with an entrepreneurial system aware of the situation, which would have the obligation to be at the forefront and to show what can be done”, concludes Tosi. “All is not yet lost in this territory”.