After Marghera, the landscape of Venice Marathon will change again. The runners will enter Parco San Giuliano.
Parco San Giuliano stands on the shores of the lagoon, near “Ponte della Libertà” and halfway between Venice and Mestre. An area with a significant symbolic role: it is both the access to Venice and center of many social and cultural interests.
This area, heavily degraded over the years, originally was a marshy area, used in recent decades as a landfill of industrial sludges and urban waste, with highly polluting factors and threats for the lagoon habitat.
With the new millennium, the project to reconvert the area started: the plan was signed by the architect Antonio Di Mambro and it was made also thanks European funds. In Italy, the project was one of the most significant interventions for consistency, complexity and difficulty due to the strong degradation of the area.
Nowadays the whole site is a green and fascinating place full of facilities and services like the cycle-pedestrian area (used also for skating) which reaches a total size of approximately 15 kilometers. With its 700 hectares of greenery in front of Venice, Parco San Giuliano is both the largest park in Europe and also an environmental and landscaping reconverting area dedicated to the study of the lagoon environment. The whole area is used for sports activities such as running, cycling, canoeing, sailing and other water sports, but also for concerts and cultural events.
Since 2006 it has been included in the race course of Venicemarathon and the Park has become one of the main points of the entire event: here in fact there will be the ‘Exposport‘, the Sport Trade Fair, open on Friday 20 October from 10.00 to 20.00 and on Saturday 21 October from 9.00 to 20.00. In the Exposport you will pick up your bib number and meanwhile you will be able to discover some of the main producers and retailers of sport products and test their latest news.
But it’s not just this: here you will enjoy the many initiatives which will take place in, such as collective training sessions and presentations and advices by qualified instructors.
When you will run here, you will be delighted by the characteristic scent of the sea, extending from the lagoon of Porto Marghera to the airport of Tessera, and the view on Fondamenta Nuove, San Michele Island, Murano and the famous bell-tower of Piazza San Marco!
Discover more about Venetian architecture by booking one of our guided running tours.
*Stories by run is a weekly column written by Venice by Run for the VMC – Venice Marathon Club events magazine.
