What do you know about one of Italy’s most glamorous regions – Veneto? Maybe you know about Venice and San Marco square, maybe you have heard about the romantic city of Verona, if you like skiing, you could hear about the Dolomites…. But what is hidden behind this mask? Maybe tons of abandoned buildings?
A fake Ponte di Rialto stands at the entrance of an abandoned amusement park on the outskirts of Mogliano Veneto. It is cracked along one arch and covered in graffiti, but structurally it is still there — a replica of one of the most recognisable bridges in the world, welcoming no one into a park that closed roughly four years after it opened. Veneland occupies a strip of land along via Marocchesa in the hamlet of Marocco, in the broad flat hinterland between Mestre and Treviso — a zone of industrial sheds, gravel quarries, and residential sprawl that offers little obvious context for what was once, for a few weekends in the late 1970s, among the most visited leisure destinations in northeastern Italy.
Historical Context
Giostrai Who Dreamed of Epcot
Veneland was inaugurated in 1977 by a group of entrepreneurs whose background came from the tradition of the spettacolo viaggiante — the travelling funfair circuit that moved from town square to town square across northern Italy. The founders were men who understood crowds and rides, but what they built at Marocco was something more ambitious than a touring funfair: a fixed, themed destination park modelled on the growing international appetite for immersive leisure spaces that, at the time, most Italians could only read about. Disneyland had been operating in California since 1955 and Walt Disney World opened in Florida in 1971; Gardaland, the first major Italian theme park of comparable ambition, had only just opened on Lake Garda in 1975. Veneland was conceived as a Venetian answer to this moment, taking the imagery of the city it stood near as its organising theme.
The park was partly covered, with an indoor zone housing the birreria, pizzeria, reptile house, aquarium, and an events and spectacle hall with its own programme for children. Outside, thematic zones were laid out around a small artificial lake, complete with a small harbour: “La Vecchia Fattoria” (the old farm), “Il Fortino” (the fort), “Il Villaggio Indiani” and “Il Villaggio Western” with cowboy shows and a riding stable. The rides included the “Macchine Bella Epoque” — vehicles evoking the fin-de-siècle atmosphere similar to the early Gardaland attraction known as “Il Villaggio degli Elfi” — and the “Treno del Safari”, a small rail-mounted train that looped around the lake zone, passing “L’Arca di Noè”, the Noah’s Ark attraction near the water. There was also a skating rink. The park was, by the standards of its time and region, genuinely comprehensive.
The response from local communities was immediate and substantial. Residents of Mogliano Veneto and the surrounding area still recall the newspaper reports of queues and traffic jams on the roads approaching Marocco every weekend. The park began turning a profit from its second year of operation, which, by the assessments of people involved at the time, was an unusually fast return for a leisure investment of this scale.
The Shareholders Turn Back to the Fairground Circuit
The park’s closure by 1981 — accounts vary slightly between 1980 and 1981 — was not the result of commercial failure. The shareholders, who had come from the travelling funfair world, judged the returns insufficient relative to their expectations, despite the founder’s insistence that profitability so early in the life of a park of this kind was exceptional, and that visitor numbers would only grow. They chose instead to redirect their capital back into the more immediately familiar and remunerative business of the touring carousel circuit. According to accounts preserved by local sources and urban documentation, two banks were prepared to step in and replace the departing shareholders, and a development plan already existed for the early 1980s — a resort hotel complex built around the artificial lake, and an expansion of the park along the lines of EPCOT Center, the Disney park that opened in Florida in 1982, with pavilions representing the nations of Europe and the world. The founder, facing serious family difficulties at the time, did not pursue the project alone. The plan was abandoned along with the park itself.
It is worth noting the longer history of the land. According to Wikipedia’s article on Marocco, the site has been documented since the sixteenth century, when the grounds held a palazzo belonging to the Tiepolo family — the prominent Venetian patrician dynasty — attached to an agricultural estate of orchards and cultivated fields. Four centuries separate the Tiepolo brolo from the Noah’s Ark ride.
What We Found
The Replica Bridge
The Ponte di Rialto is greeting you at the entrance. It is a prototype of one of the most famous Venetian bridges, though it is not possible to come up and see the park. Besides the bridge, you can find an abandoned house inside the territory. Exactly here, 30 years ago, were located all of the attractions — the “Macchine Bella Epoque”, the “Treno del Safari”, “L’Arca di Noè” — what beautiful names for attractions you could find before. Now the building stays empty, just graffiti are reminding that people are still visiting this place.
The Artificial Lake
Behind the house, we found a small artificial lake with a boat full of overgrown wild plants. Maybe here before you could find the zoo — now just wild birds are left inside this place.
Where a Food Court Once Stood
We found an area that once served as the food and social heart of the park — the zone where the birreria and pizzeria would have operated, where families sat down after the rides. Nothing functional remains. The space has been stripped, exposed to the weather, and partially colonised by vegetation that has moved in from the edges.
Current Status
As of 2026, Veneland remains standing but in advanced deterioration, with no active restoration programme underway. The site is private property, a condition that has consistently complicated any proposals for reuse over the decades. In 2010, the site underwent a significant remediation intervention to remove asbestos, confirming that by that point the structural materials themselves had become a contamination risk. Of the original attractions, virtually nothing survives in recognisable form. Almost no photographs exist documenting the park during its years of operation — the absence of a visual record of the functioning park is itself an unusual condition for a site that reportedly generated weekend traffic jams.
The municipality of Mogliano Veneto’s Piano degli Interventi (the town’s master planning instrument) does include a provision for the Veneland area: the plan calls for the regeneration of the zone between the quarries and via Marocchesa, requiring the removal of incongruous structures and degraded elements, and the preparation of a masterplan that would incorporate the site into a proposed Parco delle Cave di Marocco. At a municipal council session in October 2024, the administration confirmed that it would formally solicit the sustainable regeneration of the ex-Veneland area in accordance with the provisions already set out in the Piano degli Interventi. Whether this will result in actual transformation of the site within any defined timeframe is not clear from available sources. The area remains fenced, degraded, and closed to the public.
Urbex location:
