Campodoro

Until 1866 this comune was called Campolongo Minore. Its present name is a weld: Campo comes from Campolongo, doro comes from Bevadoro, that is the two main centres of the comune at the time, which for years had been contesting ecclesiastical and civil primacy with each other. The year before, in 1865, the bishop of Vicenza had granted parish autonomy to the church of Santa Margherita at Campodoro, detaching it from the archpriest's church of San Leonardo in Bevadoro, to which it had been attached for three centuries. As for the doro that ended up in the weld, it would come — according to the hypothesis of don Gino Segato in a pamphlet of 1925 — from the old bibatorium, a drinking trough: Bevadoro was a stopping place for pilgrims, caravans and soldiery passing between Vicenza and Padua. The first official document that names Bevadoro and Campodoro together is of 1231. On the village square, until the twentieth century, there was a church dedicated to San Giovanni Battista, the last witness of the presence of the Templars and the Knights of Malta at Bevadoro.

At the edge of Bevadoro, on the boundary with Camisano Vicentino, stands the Torrerossa: the only remnant, and an imposing one, of a fortified complex that tradition attributes to Ezzelino III da Romano, along the banks of the Ceresone. This strip between the Padua and the Vicenza country was long disputed and fortified again and again by the families involved in the fighting; when the Serenissima pacified the territory, the tower lost its defensive purpose and became a civil residence, softened with Venetian windows and balconies. Tradition also says that an underground passage ran from it to cells for prisoners — and in the ground below, a few caves have in fact been identified. The tower kept itself intact for almost ten centuries; then, in 1976, the Friuli earthquake tore an enormous gash in it. The other large building here is the Barchessa, an imposing eighteenth-century farm building, the hub of the estates of the Widmann-Rezzonico first and of the Tretti afterwards, who in 1874 took over a holding of about fourteen hundred Paduan campi. The Tretti drained and improved, and built forty farmhouses to replace as many casoni; the Rezzonico had dug the canal that still carries their name and had put up the mill that all the tenants were obliged to use.