Discover Ca’ Vendramin Reclamation Museum

The building is a long brick industrial hall with tall arched windows -- the standard architecture of an early twentieth-century pumping station, and handsome in the way such buildings usually are.

Inside, the machinery remains in situ: the engines, the pumps and the drive gear, laid out as they worked. This is the museum's real quality -- it is a plant rather than a display about plants.

The intake and outfall channels outside are part of the structure, and show the basic logic: water collected from below sea level, lifted, and discharged into the river above.

Around it are the ancillary buildings of the plant -- workshops, houses for the staff who had to live on site -- which is how these stations were always built.