The Parco delle Rimembranze, or "Sant'Elena park", is a Venetian park located on the homonymous island of Sant'Elena.
The Parco delle Rimembranze is located in Venice, and more precisely
in the Castello district, in the area of the island of Sant Elena, one
of the newest places in the metropolitan city of Venice. The Park is
named in memory of the soldiers who died during the Second World War.
In terms of popular traditions, it is said that a tree was planted
in the pine forest in memory of each victim.
The park is one of
the few green areas in the entire historic center of Venice and is
located just a few minutes from the most famous Gardens of the Venice
Biennale.
Inside the park there is a cycle path, a playground for
children and several sports fields. From the external foundations of the
park you can admire the Venetian lagoon.
From its origins to the early 1900s
The area where the park stands
was born in the 1920s, thanks to the reclamation of a "bag" that was
used for military training. The area was incorporated into the urban
fabric of the island of Sant Elena, where a church had already stood
since 1028. In the following years, with the creation of a residential
district in the park area, the latter, the residential district and the
church area they became part of the Castello district. Also on the edge
of the pine forest, the Pier Luigi Penzo stadium was built in 1913. The
first projects of the new neighborhood and the park area are due to the
intervention of Senator Piero Foscari, who spoke in the city council in
1911 to solicit the creation of this new neighborhood.
The real
projects instead began immediately after the First World War, the
recovery of this new area was entrusted to the architects GIulio
Alessandri, Duilio Torres and Giuseppe Torres, and to the engineer
Fausto Finzi, who used an already existing sandbank to transform it into
a pocket ( artificial island), which was later reclaimed, in the years
immediately following the construction work of the new district began,
and with it the first trees were also planted. The park and the entire
residential district were therefore born almost from nothing, in order
to satisfy the new housing needs of the growing Venetian population.
Recent years
On 11 September 1970, the pine forest of Sant'Elena
was hit by a very violent class F4 tornado, which came to life at 20:45
near Teolo in the Euganean Hills. The pine forest was hit hard, the
tornado uprooted dozens of trees and uncovered dozens of houses in the
pine forest area. Furthermore, the force of the wind managed to lift a
22-ton motorboat right into the stretch of lagoon in front of the Parco
delle Rimembranze, causing 21 deaths. Precisely for this reason, at the
beginning of the park of remembrances, a few meters from the public
transport piers, there is a monument in memory of the victims of the
Tornado of 11 September 1970.
On June 12, 2012, a tornado of
similar intensity struck the pine forest again, uprooting dozens of
trees in the north-facing area, this time luckily without causing any
deaths.