Maserà di Padova

Here grew up the man who in the winter of 1944, in Budapest, saved more than five thousand Hungarian Jews. Giorgio Perlasca had been born at Como on 31 January 1910, but while he was still a child his father moved the family to Maserà for work; passing himself off as the Spanish consul general, he tore them from Nazi deportation and from the Shoah. He died at Padua on 15 August 1992. The name of the village, instead, may come from maceria, rubble, and it is said to have been given by the monks who, arriving here around 874 to found a Corte, found heaps of rubble: what was left of the village destroyed by the Lombards in 610. The «di Padova» is far more recent, added in 1866 after the annexation of the Veneto to the Kingdom of Italy. Through the territory runs the via Annia, willed in 131 before Christ by the praetor Titus Annius Rufus to join Adria to Aquileia.

The Corte is the long history of the village. In 874 the bishop of Padua Rosio sent the monks of Santa Giustina to a property of his at Maserà; the lands were abandoned again in 899 because of the Hungarian invasions, and only in 970 did bishop Gozzelino entrust them once more to the Benedictines, who reclaimed the marshes. It was an ecclesiastical court: subject to civil jurisdiction but exempt from the count's magistrate, and the basilica of Santa Giustina ran it through a gastaldo, who administered thirteen hundred fields besides the church, the cellar, the stables and the houses of the tenants. In the fifteenth century the abbot Ludovico Barbo divided the estate into eighteen holdings entrusted to as many settlers; the labourers, paid by the day, lived in simple straw casoni. In 1234 Maserà had meanwhile become a free comune, though legally dependent on Padua, ruled by a podestà with a salary of fifty lire a year. The Benedictines held the Corte until 1806, when Napoleon suppressed the religious orders and its four thousand hectares passed to the public domain.