Camposampiero

At Camposampiero, Saint Anthony preached from a tree. Count Tiso VI had had a structure built for him on the branches of a walnut tree, and from up there the saint spoke to the crowds that came; he stayed from May 1231 until 13 June, the day of his death. In 1432 count Gregorio Callegari had a small sanctuary raised on the spot, and when the tree died the church was lengthened northwards so as to place the altar exactly where the walnut had stood — and there it still is. Inside, a cross made from the wood of that tree is kept as a relic.

To that stay is linked also the wonder of the trampled wheat: the crowd coming to hear him ruined the ripe ears in the fields around, the farmer took it out on the saint, and Anthony told him to have faith and come back the next day; the following morning the wheat was untouched. The episode is painted in a fresco inside the sanctuary, but it is worth saying that it appears in none of the saint's official biographies: the first to tell it is Bernardino Scardeone, in the second half of the sixteenth century. The village's name, meanwhile, appears for the first time on 15 June 1117, and indirectly at that: a notarial deed names one Folco da Camposampiero, a member of the family that had taken its name from the village.