History

Società Italiana per Condotte d’Acqua was founded on 7 April 1880. The company played an important role in Italian industry from the outset. Its first major project, the Villoresi Canal, built between 1880 and 1885 to irrigate and fertilise the Lombardy plain between the Ticino and Adda rivers, was one of the most important works of the time and the subject of studies in Italy and abroad. The company was also active abroad right away, working on aqueducts in St. Petersburg and Moscow.

In its first 25 years in the business, the company designed hundreds of aqueducts and built as many as 160 of them, totalling 817 kilometres of pipelines for internal distribution. In the years between the two world wars, Condotte built the Salerno water network and the Simbrivio aqueduct – the largest and most complex aqueduct up to that time – as well as some interesting Sicilian and Sardinian aqueducts and those on the island of Rhodes. In the same period it built the “Diversivo del Mincio” and the “Naviglio Primario” canals in the province of Ferrara. After the liberation of Rome in 1944, Condotte focused on repairing the most serious damage to the Ausino and Simbrivio aqueducts and constructing bridges and railway viaducts that had been destroyed during the war. Immediately afterwards it turned its attention to other sectors such as construction, dams, tunnels and hydroelectric plants. The most important works realised in the 1950s were the Val Galdina dome dam, the hydroelectric plant on the Tiber and the Premadio hydroelectric plant, which boasts one of the world’s largest cave power stations. In the 1960s, it built the Mont Blanc Tunnel and the Polcevara Viaduct in Genoa. By the end of the 1960s, Condotte had become a structured group of several specialised companies covering all sectors of the construction industry. The following years also saw it involved in important restoration projects, including the rescue of the Egyptian monuments of the island of Philae and Ca’ Pesaro in Venice.

In the maritime sector Condotte consolidated its standing as an international leader with the construction of the port complexes of Sines in Portugal, Bandar Abbas in Iran, Djen Djen in Algeria and Ras Laffan in Qatar. With over a hundred years of experience in the business, Condotte can boast the construction, in Italy and around the world, of dams and hydroelectric plants, roads and motorways, railways and subways, ports and maritime works, hydraulic works and irrigation projects, airports, underground works, civil works for thermal and nuclear power plants, residential spaces, offices, sports complexes, industrial and hospital facilities, and environmental and monumental works.