Lozzo Atestino

On Monte Lozzo, at the foot of the Euganean hills, there were two castles: a large one, the castle of Lozzo, said to go back to the end of the tenth century, when a count of the Maltraversi was enfeoffed with it by the emperor; and a small one, Valbona, on the opposite slope, which was merely a dependency of the first. Of the large one nothing remains, and the reason is singular. At the beginning of the fourteenth century, while Padua was at war with Cangrande della Scala, count Nicolò II da Lozzo betrayed the Paduans; found out, he arranged that in 1313 the Scaligeri themselves should demolish his castle, so that it should not fall into the hands of the enemy. A man who has his own house destroyed rather than leave it to those he has just betrayed. Today one piece of old wall of that castle survives, built into the villa that the Lando and then the Correr raised in the town.

With Lozzo gone, little Valbona became important, because it stood at the centre of the roads coming from Montagnana and from Este, on the border between the territories of Padua, Vicenza and Verona; and around it, where today there is fertile plain, there stretched then an unhealthy marsh reaching as far as Este, drained completely only with the reclamation works of 1922. The Carraresi restored and fortified it from 1338, and above both its gates they set in white stone the personal device of Ubertino I: a helmet surmounted by a horned Saracen. That it was by then a garrison in its own right is proved by a letter of 1402, with which Francesco Novello da Carrara warned the captains of his fortresses to be on their guard because he had got wind of a betrayal: among the addressees was the captain of Valbona too. Ninety years after the first, another betrayal was passing that way.