Bagnoli di Sopra

The name comes from balneoli and says that water was everywhere here. In 954 Almerico, marquis and duke of the Lombards, gave the Dominio di Bagnoli to the bishop of Padua, and the document speaks of a curte, not a villa: it was still a small thing. The leap was made by the Benedictines, who arrived around the year one thousand as a dependency of the Venetian monastery of Brondolo: they drained the land, strengthened the banks of the Adige and of the Gorzone canal, opened the first roads and planted vines on a large scale, building beside the convent the largest Benedictine cellars of their time, able to hold more than ten thousand hectolitres of wine.

In 1656, with the consent of pope Alexander VII, the monastery and all its property were put up for auction to fund the war of Candia against the Turks. The estate was cut into nine parts: eight were bought for four hundred and forty thousand ducats by count Ludovico Widmann, a nobleman from Carinthia, and the ninth went to the Nave family. Widmann turned the convent into the villa that still stands on the square and set a small theatre beside it, where Carlo Goldoni acted: a guest of the count in 1755 and again in 1757, he dedicated to him La bottega del caffè. A monastery had become a theatre because money was needed at the other end of the Mediterranean.