Correzzola

The name comes from the Latin corrigium, which means a thin strip of land emerged from the waters, and the names of its hamlets — Villa del Bosco, Concadalbero — recall the woods that covered the land along the Bacchiglione. At the beginning of the fifteenth century, between the Brenta and the Adige, stable settlements were very few: the long wars between the Carraresi of Padua and the Republic of Venice had ruined the area, and the landscape was largely marsh. Neither the Paduan landowners nor the rich Venetian lords bothered with it, since they did not think it worth investing in land improvements whose profit was uncertain. The reclamation was begun instead by the Benedictine monks who lived here, and it proved decisive for the whole economy of Padua.

The monks had arrived much earlier: in 1129 Guido de' Crescenzi and his wife sold their lands for three hundred Veronese lire to abbot Alberto of the monastery of Santa Giustina in Padua, and at the beginning of the fifteenth century the monastery moved to Correzzola the administration of all its property, because the Bacchiglione was the water road along which goods travelled from Padua to Venice. The first core of the Corte Benedettina was built between 1430 and 1450; the monks turned the marshes into fields and used the river both to sail and to produce power, with hydraulic machines advanced for their time, and they divided the reclaimed land into five gastaldie: Concadalbero, Brenta, Civè, Villa del Bosco and Cona. The municipal coat of arms holds all of this together: the wheels for the Da Carrara, whose symbol was a cart; the patriarchal cross for the Benedictines; the gold and red of the Melzi d'Eril, who received the fief of Correzzola from Napoleon in 1807. The parish church of San Leonardo goes back to the thirteenth century, was described after the visit of bishop Pietro Barozzi in 1489 and was rebuilt in 1516.