Cervarese Santa Croce

In a document of the diocese of Padua dated 2 May 874, bishop Rorio gives the Benedictine community of Cervarese his own court «with its oratory consecrated in honour of the Holy Cross»: that is the church which gives the comune half its name. It had arisen in Lombard times over a Roman cemetery area, and to build it much Roman spoil was used, brick and trachyte from Montemerlo — the quarry on that hill has been open since Roman times and still yields the classic grey trachyte. The ruinous earthquake of 1117 forced a rebuilding: what is seen today, a single nave with a trussed roof and a semicircular apse, is twelfth-century work, and keeps fragments of fresco ranging from the eleventh century to the sixteenth. Against the apse stands a massive Frankish tower of the ninth or tenth century, built to watch over the Bacchiglione and originally separate from the church: in the tenth century the raids were such that even churches were fortified, and the tower was taken into the building.

On the southern bank of the Bacchiglione, since the year one thousand, stands the castle of San Martino della Vaneza, an outpost on the border between the Paduan and the Vicentine territory, facing the fortified lands of Montegalda. It was spared the destructions ordered by Ezzelino da Romano, unlike almost all the other castles defending the Paduan countryside, and in 1324 the Comune of Padua ceded it to the Carraresi. Under the Republic of Venice, from the first half of the seventeenth century, it served as a river port; then the traffic ended, the castle became a dwelling and fell into ruin. Restored from 1985, it is today a museum of the province of Padua and holds the archaeological finds recovered in and around the river, from the late Neolithic to the medieval and modern age. The other castle, that of the Motta, was destroyed for good in 1312 by Cangrande della Scala; the village had already suffered a siege by the Vicentines in 1198.