Candiana

In the middle of the countryside south of Padua, Candiana has a church that many call the «country cathedral»: the duomo of San Michele Arcangelo, built between 1493 and 1502 to a design by Lorenzo da Bologna, monumental out of all proportion to a village, holding works by Michelangelo Morlaiter, decorations by Gerolamo Mengozzi-Colonna and statues by Giovanni Bonazza. Around it stands the former monastery: the first church and monastery were founded on 3 November 1097 at the will of Cono da Calaone, and from 1462 the Benedictines gave place to the regular canons of Saint Augustine. It was the Augustinians who shaped the territory, ordering the fields they owned and building for their tenants many rural houses in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a good number of which still stand. The monastery was suppressed in 1783 and the property passed to the Albrizzi. A detail that says much about the place: the patron alternates, in even years Saint Michael the Archangel is celebrated and in odd years Saint Leonard of Limoges.

The village was redesigned a second time in 1938, when the architect Quirino De Giorgio — in Padua he is known for the Altino and Quirinetta cinemas — designed the town hall, the casa del Fascio, a weaving and spinning workshop and a borgo that stretches for a kilometre along the road, with twenty-four rural buildings: today it is called via Borgo and, though much altered, it keeps its original plan. The coat of arms too belongs to those years: it was drawn between 1933 and 1943 and shows a peasant with a plough drawn by oxen, that is the reclamation of land wrested from the marshes, and three ears of wheat taken from the arms of the Garzoni, the Venetian nobles who in the sixteenth century had the villa of Pontecasale built. It never became official: the application submitted in 1982 ran aground on the heraldic office's objections.