Agna

The village's name is said to come from a road: the ancient via Annia, the Roman highway that ran through here. The first document to mention it dates from 970, and for the rest of the Middle Ages Agna was a possession of the da Carrara. It was in this very castle, in 1250, that Jacopo da Carrara tried in vain to hold out against the militias of Ezzelino the Third, whose bitter rival he had been: the fortress was stormed, Jacopo was murdered, and in the events that followed the ancient family papers of the Carraresi were lost. It is a detail worth more than a siege: what burned here was not only a castle, but the archive of a house.

No visible trace of that castle is left today, and the comune's own symbols are recent — the coat of arms was granted by royal decree in 1924, the gonfalone only in 1964. The memory the village keeps best belongs instead to the twentieth century: between 1900 and 1910 the parish priest of Agna was the blessed Carlo Liviero. Today's economy rests on the heavily mechanised farming of the lower Padua plain, on small industry and on clothing workshops, and on one of the most influential ceramic building-materials firms of the plain, where several generations of the same local families have followed one another.