Torviscosa

The first mention of the place, then Zuino, is of 1278. The territory lies on the line of the resurgences, it is full of water and without canals it turns to marsh: such it was at the end of the seventeenth century, when the Savorgnan counts, owners from 1344 to 1818, carried out the first reclamations. On the drained land rose Torre di Zuino, named after a tower, the only surviving piece of an old castle, around which Antonio Savorgnan built his residence; the parish church of Santa Maria Assunta is of 1727. In 1866 the village passed to the Kingdom of Italy, and until 1915 it was the last Italian place before the frontier with Austria-Hungary: a plaque by the bridge over the river Ausa recalls where the border ran. The castle, then the Corinaldi counts', was badly damaged by the war and afterwards demolished; after Caporetto the Austrians occupied the village until November 1918.

In 1937 SNIA Viscosa began buying land around Torre di Zuino in order to grow Arundo donax, the canna gentile, on a large scale and draw from it the cellulose for its own textile fibres: the crops that were there were cleared away to plant the rhizomes of the reed. The plant was inaugurated on 21 September 1938 in the presence of Mussolini, on his way back from Trieste, where a few days earlier he had announced the racial laws. In 1940 the company asked for and obtained that Torre di Zuino, until then a frazione of San Giorgio di Nogaro, should become a comune of its own with a new name that carried the product inside it: Torviscosa. The town was built over some twenty years and it is a company town in the full sense, with the housing divided rigidly according to the role of the head of the family in the works: the workers' village in two types, the houses for the clerks, those for the technicians, the villas for the managers, while for the farm labourers only the outlying places were left. One of these, the Villaggio Roma, was in 1942 the prisoner-of-war camp number 107, and until September 1943 it held about a thousand Allied prisoners, 650 New Zealanders and 350 South Africans, captured in the first battle of El Alamein: SNIA had asked for the camp in order to replace with prisoners its own workers who had left for the war.