Codevigo

Codevigo is the easternmost municipality of the province of Padua and the only one that touches the Venetian lagoon, along the stretch called Valle di Millecampi. The name is Roman, Caput Vici, the head of the village, and it appears for the first time in a document of the year 988. When the Venetians got the better of the Carraresi they began the great hydraulic works meant to save the lagoon from silting, and the cut of the Brenta Nova brought continual floods here: the land turned to marsh and the people left. They came back only after the reclamations of the first half of the sixteenth century, willed by the Corner. It was they who had Falconetto design the façade of the church and a country villa, and in that house, in those same years, Alvise Cornaro was host to Angelo Beolco, il Ruzante.

Of the casoni, the dwellings of sun-dried earth brick with four steep roof slopes covered in marsh reed, in which peasant families, sometimes large ones, used to live, only one survives here, at Rosara, and in poor condition. Two very different moments are remembered in this municipality. In the spring of 1945, as the front moved north, dozens of people were killed in the countryside around Codevigo in what is known as the massacre of Codevigo: the documentation existed from the very beginning, but for decades it was hardly spoken of. And on 7 May 1974, at Conche, the minibus bringing the nursery children home ended up in the Novissimo canal: sister Elvira Pettinato drowned trying to save them and was given the gold medal for civil valour, while the fisherman Luigi Bartella dived in and pulled two of them out, and was given the silver.