What to See in San Donà di Piave: Attractions & Sights

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Places 5

Parco della Scultura in Architettura Nature
The park in San Donà di Piave with works by Munari, Aldo Rossi, Sol LeWitt, Sottsass and Mendini among the tr…
Monumento Giannino Ancillotto Squares · More places of interest
San Donà di Piave's monument to the aviator Giannino Ancillotto, a First World War ace born in the town.
Ponte a bilanciere di Caposile Squares · More places of interest
The 1927 movable bridge over the Piave Vecchia at Caposile, opened by hand-operated counterweights.
Teatro Metropolitano Astra Museums · More places of interest
The theatre of San Donà di Piave, founded in 1885 and rebuilt in 2014 to a design by Gonçalo Byrne.
Museo Della Bonifica Museums · More places of interest
San Donà di Piave's civic museum on the reclamation of the Lower Piave, in a former Poor Clares convent.

More places of interest

Monumento Giannino Ancillotto

The monument to Giannino Ancillotto in San Donà di Piave commemorates the aviator born here on 15 November 1896, holder of the Gold Medal of Military Valour and a fighter ace of the First World War, with eleven confirmed victories. It was raised a few years after his death with funds from a national subscription, to which the government of Peru contributed more than half the cost, to a design by the architect Pietro Lombardi, and was inaugurated on 15 November 1931, the anniversary of his birth.
What to see
Ancillotto belonged to the family of the Counts Ancillotto, landowners. In 1917 he began attacking with rockets the Austro-Hungarian tethered balloons used as artillery observation posts, the «Drachen»: over Rustignè, after firing his rockets almost point-blank, he could no longer avoid the balloon and flew straight through it, coming out alive from the cloud of burning hydrogen, wounded and with his aircraft badly damaged. The feat won him the gold medal and a cover of the Domenica del Corriere drawn by Achille Beltrame.
After the war, on 11 September 1919 he flew non-stop from Rome to Warsaw in seven hours to deliver a dispatch to the Polish president Paderewski; on 2 May 1921 he landed at Cerro de Pasco, in Peru, at 4330 metres, the highest altitude reached until then for a landing. He died on 18 October 1924 at Caravaggio in a road accident, on his way to a gathering of gold-medal holders.
Visiting
Ancillotto is buried in the cemetery of San Donà di Piave, and the town has also named a street after him.
Our editors' tip
Back in San Donà during the war, Ancillotto found that his family's villa had become an enemy command post and observation point: when the order came to destroy them, he asked to carry out the mission himself and bombed his own home at low altitude.
Ponte a bilanciere di Caposile

The balance bridge of Caposile is a movable bridge in the village of that name, on the boundary between the municipalities of San Donà di Piave and Musile di Piave. It links the two banks of the Piave Vecchia, a few metres upstream of its confluence with the Taglio del Sile. It was built in 1927, after the First World War, and dedicated to General Armando Diaz; it stayed in service until 1957, when the present road crossing over the Piave Vecchia was opened.
What to see
The bridge was designed to let boats pass along what was then an important inland waterway. The mechanism is a system of counterweights: thanks to the balance beams the two platforms of the central span are raised by hand, opening the way on the river, and lowered again for those crossing.
Because of its shape the bridge has been compared to the Langlois bridge, the drawbridge that Van Gogh painted several times.
Visiting
In 2015 the bridge underwent a major conservation project, funded partly by the municipality of San Donà and partly by that of Musile. It is reached at Caposile, where the Piave Vecchia meets the Taglio del Sile.
Our editors' tip
The bridge marks a double boundary: between two municipalities and between two rivers, because just downstream the Piave Vecchia receives the waters of the Taglio del Sile, the canal that carries the Sile towards the old bed of the Piave.
Teatro Metropolitano Astra

The Teatro Metropolitano Astra is the theatre of San Donà di Piave, rebuilt from scratch in 2014 to a design by the Portuguese architect Gonçalo Byrne. Its story begins in 1885, when private citizens built the Teatro Sociale, later destroyed by bombing in the First World War. Rebuilt and inaugurated on 22 September 1921 as the Teatro Verdi, it was destroyed again in the Second World War and rebuilt in 1951 as the Cinema Teatro Astra, for years the venue of music and theatre seasons.
What to see
After a long closure the old cinema-theatre was demolished to build a larger, more modern one: work began in the first months of 2014 and the new theatre was inaugurated on 21 December of the same year. Outside it is a block of pinkish reinforced-concrete elements, almost twenty-three metres high, with glazing at the base near the entrance and, top left, the lettering «Astra Teatro Metropolitano».
Inside, the stage measures 180 square metres; the stalls have 326 seats, reaching right up to the stage, and the gallery 172. The foyer floor is in trachyte.
Visiting
Season, performances and tickets are on the theatre's official website.
Our editors' tip
Today's building is the fourth theatre in this venue's history: Sociale, Verdi, Astra and Metropolitano Astra, each time rebuilt after a war or a demolition.
Museo Della Bonifica

The Museo della Bonifica, also called MUB, is the civic museum of San Donà di Piave: established in 1975, it gathers images and objects on the history of the town and the centuries-long transformation of the surrounding land. It is housed in a former convent of Poor Clares built in 1967, which the town council bought in 1982. It was originally meant to be a museum of rural life, under the name «Museum of the peoples of the Veneto and the Lower Piave»; the long collaboration with the Basso Piave land-reclamation consortium brought in so much material on the history of reclamation that the council changed its approach and its name. It opened to the public in 1983 and was enlarged with a new wing inaugurated in 1998.
What to see
The route is chronological and divided into five sections. The archaeological one shows Roman and late antique finds from the Lower Piave, many from the settlement of ancient Heraclia. The ethnographic one recreates the farming world before the great reclamation works, and the reclamation section tells of the works in eastern Veneto, begun at the end of the nineteenth century and completed in the first half of the twentieth.
The war section brings together evidence of the two world wars, and the natural history section uses dioramas, panels and drawings to show what the environment was like before reclamation. The map archive holds maps of the area from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, including Italian and Austro-Hungarian military maps of the Great War.
Visiting
The museum has a specialist library of about eleven thousand volumes on agriculture, reclamation, Venetian history and the Great War, and keeps the municipal historical archive, which starts from 1918 because the older papers were lost during the First World War. Opening times and tickets should be checked on the civic museums website.
Our editors' tip
In the old core of the library, more than two hundred volumes, is a copy of the Atlante geografico d'Italia, the first Italian atlas, in the edition printed in Bologna in 1642.