Monument to the Venetian Partisan

Architecture, sculpture, and water for a memory without rhetoric

The Monument to the Venetian Partisan, also known for the inscription “Venice in the Partisan Style”, is one of the most intense and least rhetorical places of Venetian Resistance memory. It is located along the Riva dei Partigiani, in the Biennale Gardens, in direct contact with the lagoon, where the water becomes an integral part of the work.

The current sculpture is the work of Augusto Murer, an artist and partisan, who chooses a radical representation: the lifeless body of a woman, stretched out, her hands tied close to her face. There's no heroic gesture, no celebratory verticality. The Resistance is evoked as sacrifice, suffered violence, irreparable loss.

The monument was born from a complex story. A first Partisan, made in 1957 in ceramic by Leoncillo Leonardi, was destroyed in 1961 by a neo-fascist bomb attack.
After that act, the city decides to rebuild the monument, entrusting the sculpture to Murer and the architectural arrangement to Carlo Scarpa.

Scarpa's intervention is essential and powerful. The statue does not dominate the space, but is placed on a lowered platform, almost at water level. Around it, a sequence of concrete pillars with Istrian stone caps emerges from the lagoon at varying heights, creating an unstable threshold between land and sea. The tide, the reflection of the water, and the motion of the waves continually alter the perception of the work.

The project initially included a floating platform, later abandoned due to technical problems related to the lagoon environment. This direct confrontation between idea and reality makes the monument even more authentic: not an isolated object, but a fragile device, exposed to time, water, and history.

The Monument to the Venetian Partisan is today a silent and powerful place, where architecture, sculpture, and landscape merge in a memory that is not triumphal but profoundly human. A work that demands to be observed closely, slowly, allowing water and time to complete its meaning.

Main data

Opera: Monument to the Venetian Partisan
Signing up: “Venice in the Partisan Style”
Place: Riva dei Partigiani, Gardens of the Biennale, Venice
Sculpture: Augusto Murer
Architectural arrangement: Carlo Scarpa
First version (1957, destroyed): Leoncillo Leonardi
Chronology: sculptural project 1961; arrangement Scarpa 1964–1969 approx.
Materials: bronze (sculpture), reinforced concrete, Istrian stone, copper
Type: open-air memorial, integrated with the lagoon
Conservation status: fair / with clear signs of exposure to the marine environment