San Sabba Rice Mill

Risiera di San Sabba is a former industrial complex in Italy, built as a rice-husking factory between 1898 and 1913. Long buildings surround an open courtyard, where the crematorium chimney once stood.

Production ended between 1927 and 1934, and parts of the site later served as army storage and barracks. After the occupation in October 1943, the complex became a police detention camp for imprisonment, torture, selection and deportation. A crematory oven operated there from 1944 until the end of the war, making this the only Nazi camp in Italy with such a facility.

The largely preserved mini-cell hall contains seventeen tiny cells for political prisoners, resistance members, Jewish people and civilians. The courtyard, former machine room and former boiler room now form part of a national monument and civic museum, opened in 1975 after Romano Boico’s redesign. Photographs, documents, objects from former deportees and video testimonies extend the memorial into the present.