Northwest of the postcard-perfect quarters of Italy's Renaissance Ferrara, beyond the threads of canals and railway lines above ground, a somewhat gloomy concrete cylinder rises. Due to its multi-story internal galleries that encircle the gigantic central free space, this structure is regularly compared to the Colosseum. However, the harsh brutalist geometry was created for purely pragmatic purposes, as it is the heart of the former Eridania spirits factory. The beautiful name Oculus (Latin for "eye") was given to the structure by stalkers and fans of industrial decay, who were charmed by the round light lantern at the very top. The enterprise survived the bombings of World War II and managed to become the main producer of ethanol in Italy, but unexpectedly fell silent in 2007 under the pressure of European economic policy. Let's see how the industrial giant coexisted on the outskirts of the museum city and what future awaits the concrete giant now that the surrounding workshops have been almost completely leveled to the ground.

The city of dukes and its underside

Ferrara is a classic museum city. People come here to see the austere brick castle of the Estense, Renaissance palaces, and the impeccable quarters of the Addizione Erculea, which are sacred to the history of world urban planning. Built on the cusp of the 15th and 16th centuries, the district became the first example in European history of an "ideal city" with a regular layout, and in many ways, it was ahead of its time by centuries. It is precisely this architectural revolution that has earned Ferrara its place on the current UNESCO World Heritage list, thanks to the local d'Este dynasty. Tourists formally ride rented bicycles through the flat, old streets and usually do not even suspect that just a couple of kilometers from this triumph of Renaissance thought, a dull industrial belt begins. A little over a hundred years ago, on the site of the concrete wasteland, ordinary meadows were noisy, vineyards were green, and no one could have imagined that they would soon be replaced.

The industrial breakthrough occurred in the first half of the twentieth century, when the patriarchal way of life, habitual for the era, began to be deliberately broken for the needs of heavy industry.

The main step was the opening in 1932 of the deep Boicelli canal. The five-kilometer waterway finally connected Ferrara with the navigable Po River. Just four years later, the city's outskirts officially turned into a large industrial zone with an area of almost three hundred hectares. The site was specifically tasked with processing giant sugar beet harvests, whose plantings occupied the surrounding drained swamps. For the future enterprise, a generous plot of eleven hectares was allocated. The location was chosen perfectly, just a couple of kilometers from the old fortress walls, but at the intersection of three logistical routes: the new canal, the railway, and the highway.

Under the wing of the sugar giant

The ambitious industrial project started under the rumble of the approaching world war. In 1938, the Italian joint-stock company FIDA purchased the land by the canal, planning to deploy the production of high-octane additives for the needs of the Italian military aviation. The factories were planned to be expanded at the expense of workshops for the production of polymer resins, but the unfolding hostilities froze the construction. For almost two decades, the site stood abandoned, until in 1955 the rights to it were acquired by the company Distillerie Italiane. The new owners immediately rewrote the plans and instead of defense orders, they bet on peaceful chemistry. Now, the factory planned to process local beet molasses into butyl alcohol, and then into pure ethanol for the perfume and alcohol industries, with parallel production of dry ice and feed yeast.

In the late 1960s, the enterprise finally came under the control of the largest national sugar union Eridania.

The symbiosis looked perfect. The beet molasses, which remained after sugar crystallization at the neighboring factories of the province, flowed like a river into the workshops of the distillery. The enterprise consciously refused to have its own trading network. The obtained spirits were shipped by the ton to wholesalers for the needs of pharmacists, perfumers, liquor producers, and household chemicals.

The "Colosseum" from the inside

Official city records refer to the current Torre Oculus as the "Distillation Tower" (Torre Piezometrica di distillazione). However, behind the dull bureaucratic name lies an outstanding monument of Italian rationalism, where the form is uncompromisingly dictated by function, and any decorative excesses are absent as a matter of principle. The construction of the tower is simple and monumental: a sturdy reinforced concrete frame, neat brick filling, and a strict rhythm of paired windows. Inside, the seven floors spiral into ring-shaped galleries around an absolutely empty central core. The sunlight penetrating through the glazed upper lantern (the very oculus, eye) in a massive metal frame turns the interior into an impressive photo zone, where deep shadows emphasize the texture of exposed concrete.

The modern void at the heart of the structure once served as a technological shaft. It was here that huge vertical rectification columns were installed. The process was continuous. Thick beet molasses was pre-fermented in huge vats for about two days, turning into strong brew, after which it was sent for distillation to the tower, where the spirit vapors rose upwards, condensing into pure ethanol. Some of the smaller rectification units worked right under the open sky, on a platform behind the building. The tower itself served as the central hub of the entire conveyor. An above-ground metal bridge connected it to the laboratories and administrative building, and next to it stood a five-story concrete silo for grain storage. Today, only the bare concrete walls remain from the complex production mechanism. All the equipment has long been removed and scrapped.

The victim of bureaucracy

The Ferrara sugar conveyor completely stopped on March 5, 2007. After a radical reform of the EU sugar market, the number of specialized factories in Italy dropped from nineteen to four. The raw material base of the distillery evaporated, the remnants of local molasses skyrocketed in price, and the market was flooded with cheap imported ethanol from Brazil and Pakistan. The management's attempt to save the workshops by producing automotive bioethanol failed in just a couple of years, as soon as the Italian government canceled tax benefits for alternative fuel. A painfully familiar situation occurred in Italy. The remaining idle complex was quickly dismantled for scrap metal, valuable equipment was sold, and most of the workshops were simply bulldozed.

The empty site was bought by the development company Real Estate Ferrara from the Maccaferri group.

Instead of the proposed residential complex with 570 apartments, the city authorities approved a modest phased plan for three hundred residential units with the mandatory restoration of the tower itself, which is protected as an architectural monument. However, the renovation got stuck in bureaucratic red tape, and the empty industrial giant was occupied by illegal immigrants. In 2023, the police found about fifteen makeshift living rooms inside. After a major fire in January 2025, the mayor of Ferrara obliged the owner to secure the perimeter of the facility, leaving the concrete "Colosseum" alone to wait for its uncertain future.

A magnet for fans of promarh

In the international community of stalkers and photographers of abandoned places, the Italian tower has long gained cult status. The popular online guide Atlas Obscura describes this post-apocalyptic object as something between a futuristic arena and a museum of industrial archaeology. Sunbeams piercing through the ceiling dome turn the concrete galleries into monumental theatrical stages. Due to the fence and security, there are almost no banal graffiti tags here, but the internal space hides high-quality street art. The surrounding rusty pipeline overpasses, remnants of rails, and bridges still create an ideal setting for industrial photo shoots.

However, behind the brutal aesthetics lies a fairly prosaic threat.

As early as 2015, engineers from the University of Ferrara conducted an examination of the structure and delivered a discouraging verdict: the protective layer of concrete is rapidly deteriorating, the reinforcement is being eaten away by corrosion, and the internal partitions have been officially declared hazardous. Furthermore, the abandoned factory turned out to be simply toxic. While extinguishing a fire in January 2025, rescuers stumbled upon a half-forgotten storage facility containing fifty containers of hazardous chemicals, including nitrobenzene and formaldehyde.

At one time, students developed four scenarios for reviving the territory, but the beautiful concepts have remained gathering dust in university archives. Today, the most reasonable and safe way to assess the scale of Ferrara's concrete "eye" is to admire it from a distance. As long as this colossus remains standing, it reminds us of the times when the city was associated not only with palaces, but also with the smoke of factory chimneys.

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