Arre

In the fields of Arre there are patches of sand that here they call brusaure, and they are seen above all along the road that leads to Conselve: they are the mark of a river that once passed this way and is no longer there. The ground, for that matter, was made by the Adige, laying down over the centuries clays, sands and peat; the village lies between the Adige and the Bacchiglione, on a plain that runs from four to six metres above sea level. With a slope like that the water does not go away by itself, and to make it drain a dense web of ditches has been dug over the centuries: the two main channels, the Rebosola and the Sorgaglia, go back to the centuries of the Serenissima, when the great reclamation works were carried out in the countryside around Padua. On that land, today, they grow wheat, maize, soya, sugar beet and grapes.

Arre is a comune without hamlets: there is a single centre, where the road from Conselve to Agna meets the one that leads to Padua, and then houses scattered all over the countryside. In the Middle Ages the villa of Arre was made up of the holdings of monastic bodies — San Michele di Brondolo, Santa Giustina of Padua, San Michele di Candiana — and of noble families such as the Da Baone, the Da Carrara, the Papafava, the Capodilista; in the nineteenth century those properties passed into the hands of families of the local middle class. Of that time there remain the eighteenth-century complex of the former Papafava, the neoclassical villa of the former Paviato and the neogothic parish church. Between 1888 and 1954 the village also had a stop on the tramway that ran from Padua to Bagnoli di Sopra; then came the years when people left for Milan and Turin, and today they leave in the morning and come back in the evening.