Farewell to Giorgio Bortolato, the engineer and father of the Actv vaporetti
VENICE – «He was a person close to everyone, who liked to enjoy life. Always together with my mother, who passed away four years ago, and with us children and friends ». So Andrea remembers his father, Giorgio Bortolatohistorical designer and former director general of the Actv, who died on Friday evening at the age of 84 due to natural causes. Born in the city of water in 1938, in the Santa Croce district, after retirement he then moved to live in Mogliano. As a naval officer – as transferred by his son, who was also a naval engineer engaged in the “Innave” design company founded in the early nineties by his father – he moved on to designing the first class of Enrico Toti submarines in post-war Italy. Later, Bortolato worked at the Breda shipyard – today Fincantieri – and then landed, in 1975, in the Venetian public transport company Actv. It was at the end of the 1980s that the engineer, together with his colleague Silvio Zanus, created the first fully electric vaporetto in the fleet. «The E1, still in operation today», adds his son, also recalling how the entire ACTV fleet was «practically all designed by him. From the Seventies to the Nineties ».
FAMILY OF ENGINEERS
A family, that of the Bortolato family, strongly anchored in the world of engineering, starting with Angelo, Giorgio’s grandfather, also an electrical engineer and to whom we owe the design of the first electrification of the tram, which took place in 1904. As testified by a old article of “Il Gazzettino” of the time that reported the execution – passed without any difficulty – of the test test of the San Giuliano – Mestre tramway, which later became San Giuliano – Mestre – Treviso, with the train driven by the engineer Angelo Bortolato. The other son, Guido, Andrea’s brother, also an engineer, continues the family tradition. “Among the episodes that make it clear who my father was, there is that of when he himself took a bottle of Schioppettino as a gift from the mayor of Mogliano at the time, Sometimes, once elected in 2006”, Andrea, also reporting the memory linked to the championship won by his nephew, Alberto Ciccio Vianiniwith the Benetton Basket in 1992. On that occasion the father prepared his much appreciated fish soup for the whole team. The last farewell will be Wednesday, at 10, in the Cathedral of Mogliano.