History
Work on the construction of the station began in 1860. To make room for the station and its forecourt, both a convent and the Church of Santa Lucia were demolished in 1861. The station then took the name of the church.
The current station building is one of the few modernist buildings facing the Grand Canal. It is the result of a series of plans started by the rationalist architect Angiolo Mazzoni in 1924, and developed by him over the next decade.
In 1934, a contest for a detailed design for the current station was won by Virgilio Vallot. Between 1936 and 1943, Mazzoni and Vallot collaborated on the construction of the station building, and Mazzoni also worked on the train hall. The work was completed only some years later, in 1952, to a design developed by another architect, Paul Perilli.
In November 2009, work began on the renovation of the station. The renovation will include improvements to the use of spaces and the flow of internal transit. Additionally, certain architectural elements will be recovered and restored, and the atrium will be altered to house several retail spaces. The project is estimated to take two years and cost 24 million euros.
Read more about this topic: Venezia Santa Lucia Railway Station
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to “realize” myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have “succeeded” this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is “realizable.” Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
“Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.”
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)