Footage of an abandoned kiln and hydro-electrical plant. The Navile Canal passes through here which was central to industrial uses here in the late 1900s. A few deaths were also recorded here in recent years as it was visited by homeless people. Long term plans will transform this area into social and cultural facilities.

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The Battiferro Industrial Park Photos

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About The Battiferro Industrial Park

The Battiferro Industrial Park

Across the Navile Canal from the Industrial Heritage Museum is this run-down kiln. It’s part of the whole Battiferro complex that produced bricks and tiles. There are long term plans to restore this kiln. In the meantime, however, there are obvious signs that this one may have been home to groups of homeless people in the past.

This memorial, for example, near the foot of a chimney is dedicated to Tatino and Patrizia. They were two homeless people killed here on the morning of 23rd December 1990 by a gang of brothers referred to as the ‘Uno Bianca’.

And only a few meters away in front of the huge oven doors is another memorial to Massimo Venturi who died here in 2003 although it doesn’t say how he died.

Inside oven number 3 is evidence indeed that this former kiln was used as a temporary home. Rubbish, clothes and even the odd blanket litter the ground. On the floor above the oven is over grown with brambles and rough grass. It would have been here where the stokers fed coal into the fuel ducts for the ovens below. It may also have been used as a drying room for the bricks and tiles before they were fired in the kiln.

Back across the Navile Canal are these old buildings belonging to the hydro-electric company. Although the River Reno feeds this canal this was not the natural course of the canal. This particular part of the river was redirected here in 1548 by the architect Giacomo Baruzzi as part of the plan to use natural resources for industrial purposes.

The buildings are of course abandoned now but there are long term plans to transform this waste ground into facilities for social and cultural uses – as specifically drawn up by the Galotti Company when they handed this area over to the city of Bologna.

Just like the Industrial Museum nearby its believed that part of this complex will also support some kind of museum and various exercises in order to rekindle part of the flourishing industrial past that once survived here.

And right next door to the old plant is its modern brother.

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