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S.A. Zuccherificio di Avezzano

: : g a l l e r y : :

At the end of the XIX century an Italian-German company decided to built a sugar mill in the Fucino Lake, which was drained a few years before. In 1894 the sugar mill was putted on stream. It was provided with three high chimneys and steam engines, and its working capacity was of 5000/6000 hundred kilos of beets per day, employing a few hundreds of workers. It was connected to the main railway line by an own track leading inside the area. Monthly, a private freight train transported sugar from Avezzano station to Roma freight terminal and then to the commercial port of Napoli. In 1915 the factory was destroyed by a strong earthquake. Soon it was rebuilt and modernized by Romana Zuccheri sugar company, which owned the plant until 1927, when a new company was created: S.A. Zuccherificio di Avezzano. Total capacity was highly increased to 12.000 hundred kilos per day, and the sugar quality was improved. 1936 was an important date: the entire complex was enlarged by the building of the alcohol distillery and old lime kilns where replaced by new modern ones. During the Second World War the factory was object of repeated air bombings and production was interrupted until the end of the war. Already in 1945 it slowly restarted to work. During the period between 1954 and 1963 the sugar mill was totally renovated, enabling an increase of production capacity to the top of 42.000 hundred kilos per day.

The sugar mill before the earthquake of 1915

At the beginning of the 80s the national sugar industry was reorganized in to a few big enterprises, and many stand-alone companies were left outside. Avezzano's one was part of them. It failed in 1985 and the sugar mill ceased every activity two years later.

Architectonically speaking the most important building, called "casa zucchero" (sugar house), is one of the best examples of integration between old industrial architecture made of stones and new concrete one. This building was part of the 1936 renovation plan and it was built just over the previous one, partially visibile in some walls on the ground floor. The boiler house, result of the same renovation plan, was rebuilt too, enlarged and provided with a huge concrete cooling tower. Finally, an interesting installation is the Porion oven, a furnace able to convert distillery slop into a blackened ash rich of potash, used as fertilizer or fodder.