Barbona

Barbona lies at the southern end of the province of Padua, on the left bank of the Adige, and is a scattered comune with a peculiarity: the town hall is not at Barbona but in the smaller hamlet of Lusia, where it was moved by a royal decree of 1873. That Lusia, moreover, bears the same name as the comune of Lusia on the other side of the river, in the province of Rovigo. The village's name, on the other hand, comes from a person: a Barbone of the Venetian Morosini family, who owned these lands and had the parish church built at the beginning of the seventeenth century; and from the Morosini come the colours of the coat of arms, granted in 1932. A gonfalon, however, the comune has still not given itself.

At the place called Rotta Sabbadina you can see the remains of a Venetian hydraulic work, and the name explains why. In 1513, tradition says, the Venetians deliberately broke the embankment of the Adige to stop the imperial French army, allied with the duke of Ferrara, from crossing the river; and since they did it on a Saturday, the breach took that name. It is one of those cases where water was used as a weapon, and the place name has remembered it for five centuries.