Cinto Euganeo

The name comes from the Latin cinctum, which means enclosed, ringed: the village sits inside a ring of five hills, monte Cinto, Fasolo, Gemola, Lozzo and Rusta. In Roman times it was a colony of the gens Quintia, and from that period one thing remains that still works: the Roman aqueduct of Valnogaredo, still in use. On the top of monte Cinto stood a castle, oval in shape and protected by walls, strengthened by Ezzelino da Romano and razed to the ground in 1313 during the war between the Scaligeri and the Carraresi; it was linked to a second, lower castle, and together they controlled the roads that climbed from the plain towards the western Euganean Hills. The comune, incidentally, is a scattered one: the town hall is not at Cinto but in the locality of Fontanafredda.

Until the nineteenth century there were prosperous thermal baths here, those of the Val Calaona, with a service of horse-drawn carriages that brought the customers from Este and the villages around; they appear already in the first advertising bills of that century. After they closed the local people went on using them freely, until the nineties, when that water was turned to the growing of plants and flowers. At Valnogaredo, instead, the Contarini built in the seventeenth century a villa that came to hold three hundred and twenty-six canvases by important artists, later sold off; the church of that hamlet, documented from 1297 and rebuilt by the Contarini in 1519, was redone in baroque style in 1758 and in 1921 was declared a national monument, for its architecture and for what it keeps inside: the frescoes of Jacopo Guarana and, on the front, the statues of Bonazza. One last curiosity: until 1826 Cinto belonged not to the diocese of Padua but to that of Verona.