Granze

The name comes from the granze, which were the collecting centres for the farm produce of monastic estates: warehouses, granaries, the farmstead of an abbey. The village was born of that function, and the proof is still standing: villa Ca' Conti, today Rusconi-Camerini, with its frescoed central body of 1580 in Palladian style, stands on the remains of a Benedictine control station, and still has its oratory. Before the monks there had been the Romans: from the fields have come tombs, amphorae and the foundations of the walls of ancient domus, and the area is thought to have been centuriated; the finds are gathered in a museum the village shares with nearby Solesino.

The parish church is dedicated to Saint Christina and was completed in 1582, then remade several times; beside it stand the bell tower and a trachyte well that carries the date 1556. The other building worth looking at is Casa Prosdocimi, a typical Venetian farm building with a wide porticoed barchessa, that is, the portico where the tools and the harvest were kept. As a comune, instead, Granze is very young: it was born in 1914, when it separated from Vescovana, the village you meet going towards the Polesine. Today it counts a little over two thousand inhabitants and lives on what it has always lived on, that is, the land.