Bovolenta

The village stands where the Bacchiglione and the Vigenzone canal meet, at the place called Pontara, and that confluence explains everything else: it made Bovolenta a crossroads of the river network that carried goods between the Euganean hills, Venice and the Adriatic. The name appears for the first time in 1027, in a deed of donation from Litolfo da Carrara to the abbey of Carrara Santo Stefano. Precisely because the spot was strategic the Carraresi raised a castle here, for centuries one of the most important fortresses of the Paduan territory: its destruction by the Venetians in 1388 marked a turning point in the war for the conquest of Padua. Rebuilt, in 1509 it held out against the siege of the emperor Maximilian, who took his revenge four years later by ordering it pulled down. Part of what was left was demolished in 1975, but next to it still stand, restored, the early eighteenth-century houses of the cavallanti: the men who drove the horses that towed the boats.

The village keeps its hardest memory inside a garbled name. In 1631 the plague took many lives, and the dead were buried near the district of the prati arcati, the arched meadows; in time that place name was corrupted into patriarcati, and so it has stayed — the field where the plague dead lie has held on to their memory inside a word nobody could explain any more. In 1853 a shrine was raised near the pumping station of the pratiarcati, to remember them not far from where they were laid. The Venetian centuries left instead a good number of villas, at the end of the eighteenth century a proto-industry of textiles and, in 1782, a literary circle called the Accademia dei Concordi.