Biblioteca civica di Mestre VEZ, Mestre

The Mestre Civic Library is a library belonging to the municipality of Venice whose headquarters are located in the historic Villa Erizzo, located in the center of Mestre. The library is also known today by the acronym VEZ.

The VEZ is part of a particular book and documentary reality, the Venetian one, which has played an important part in the preservation of the history of mankind, suffice it to recall the legacy of the Greco-Latin and Venetian civilizations, preserved in the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana and the Frari Archives.

But the function of the VEZ is not only this: for a long time Mestre has lacked a particular place that could function both as a place of study or consultation of books and as a true "square of knowledge," a place where sociality aimed at cultural enrichment could be developed democratically. The library, based on the Public Library model, was set up in this way to act as a catalyst, along with the other cultural elements of the Venetian mainland of cultural dissemination. So the VEZ is not a closed place, but has been conceived as the fulcrum of a system, collaborating with the local association reality, to become the instrument aimed at enhancing active participation in cultural elaboration.