Porta San Genesio

Porta San Genesio is Venzone's eastern gate-tower, raised around 1309 and the only one of the town's three medieval gate-towers never altered or demolished in ordinary times. Nearly destroyed by the 1976 earthquake, it was rebuilt between 1978 and 1979 by the heritage authority working with local masons.

Why it matters

Venzone once had three gate-towers guarding its wall circuit; Porta San Genesio is the one that came through history unaltered. The regional cultural heritage catalogue records it as the only gate-tower that never underwent modification or demolition — apart, that is, from the collapses of the earthquakes of the last century — and attributes its construction to around 1309, when the Duke of Carinthia rebuilt the walls after the patriarchal siege of that year. The structure is recorded in the regional inventory under the name of San Zenetto (Senzenetto), and it is not a simple opening in the curtain but a true fortified gate: a two-level tower with a vaulted passage, a double portal, and the fixings for a drawbridge over the moat. Its near-destruction on 6 May 1976 and its reconstruction by the monuments authority between 1978 and 1979, using local firms, made it the first monument of the circuit to be restored after the earthquake — a trial run, in stone, for the anastylosis projects that followed across the town.

What to notice

The rectangular-plan tower straddles the wall at the eastern corner; its passage runs through a barrel vault beneath a two-storey superstructure. The doorway is doubled — first a low-arched outer portal, then an inner one with a pointed arch — and both still preserve, set into the arch soffits, the sockets that housed the original heavy door leaves. Above, a rectangular window opens at the level of the wall walk, which was reached by stairs inside the circuit; the window's present form is perhaps a seventeenth-century modification. Two limestone corbels, repositioned in 1967, mark the housing of the original drawbridge; the masonry bridge now crossing the moat dates to the seventeenth century. A stone plaque north of the gate records repairs in 1571. The tower's exterior uses the same rough-dressed local limestone as the surrounding curtain.

Context and history

The gate belongs to the town's thirteenth- and fourteenth-century defensive history. When patriarchal forces took Venzone in 1309 and forced the Duke of Carinthia to demolish the walls, the duke rebuilt the circuit the same year; the eastern gate-tower, recorded under the name of San Zenetto, probably dates from that campaign. Reinforcements followed in 1336, after the patriarchal siege, and the great earthquake of 25 January 1348 damaged the circuit again. In 1571 the walls underwent repairs recorded by the inscription plaque near this gate — works that cost one of the sixteen towers of the circuit. The seventeenth century brought arrow slits and masonry bridges; the nineteenth, the loss of the other two gates to road building; the twentieth, a new western gate in 1920, Allied bombing in December 1944 that destroyed the wall stretch to the north, and monument-authority restorations of 1951-1954 that stabilised this tower. Then came 6 May 1976: the gate was left almost completely destroyed, and its reconstruction of 1978-1979, by the Soprintendenza with local craftsmen, reopened the way into the borgo for the reconstruction era that followed.