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exploring taste – Spring/Summer 2016 heritage – Utopia made real
Large stables for cattle and houses for the cattlemen The “casa Rossa”, symbol of the Santa Margherita Group
Illustrations KARIN KELLNER
UTOPIA MADE REAL
Words CRISTIANO DE MAJO
ong and narrow roads that cut through farmlands, a low skyline blurred by the fog, old farmhouses It all began with a farming estate of more than one thousand hectares. The land, acquired by Gaetano Marzotto in
scattered on the land; this is the landscape you see as you travel from Venice to Portogruaro. 1934, was previously owned by the Stucky family, which had reclaimed the marshy terrain in the 1920s. Marzotto’s
L Venice is at once close and distant from here. The cultural splendor of the city reaches these lands, plan was to incorporate it into a new agricultural hub with integrated activities and state of the art productive
but this is a territory with its own specific characteristics, a land of products and of production that for systems, completing the overall reclamation of this wetland area. The model of inspiration was clearly Valdagno
centuries has been La Serenissima's larder. The agro-industrial complex of Villanova Santa Margherita (in the province of Vicenza), the place where in 1836 the Marzotto family had established a wool manufacturing
and Torresella are located respectively to the east and south-east of Portogruaro, if you are driving down company, transforming a cottage industry into a modern enterprise, while at the same time completely rethinking
the SS14. It is a "new" development, uniquely shaped like few other Italian realities by an industrial and the local architectural and functional layout. Valdagno is the base from which the history of one of Italy's most
dynastic history, that of the Marzotto's and their ideas about work and society. legendary entrepreneurial families began. The story dates as far back as the eighteenth century with the commerce
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