Boara Pisani

The old name of this village is the river's name, and not figuratively: Boara should come from the Lombard bouga, meaning ring, curve, bend, the word used for the winding of watercourses. The village stands on the left bank of the Adige, at the southern tip of the province of Padua, and looks across at Boara Polesine, which bears the same name but is a hamlet of Rovigo: the same river that christened them both keeps them apart, and not only by bank, since the provincial boundary runs between them too. The new name, on the other hand, is a family's: Pisani was added by royal decree of 5 January 1868, in honour of the Pisani, who had backed the reclamation of the area.

What followed is told by the coat of arms, granted by decree of the President of the Republic of 10 February 1953. It is not a coat of arms invented for the comune: it takes up the blazon of the Venetian family of the Pisani and adds to it the corno dogale, that is, the headgear of the doge of Venice, because a Pisani, Alvise, was doge from 1735 to 1741. So a village of reclaimed farmland carries on its shield the colours of its benefactors and the sign of an office that never had its seat here: it is the way new lands, those wrested from the water, gave themselves a history — by borrowing the history of whoever had paid for them. Today the village is known to most people for a prosaic reason: this is where the Boara - Rovigo Nord exit stands on the motorway running down towards Bologna.