Mestrino

The name is a measure of distance: Mestrino comes from millium trinum, that is three miles from the Vicenza border, and in the municipal arms there are indeed three milestones. Beside the milestones there is a tower, and it recalls the castle the noble Schinella held here, in a strategic position on the via Gallica, the Roman road that linked Padua to Turin: in 1258 Ezzelino da Romano stormed it and had it pulled down. It is because of that road, and because of the fertility of the land watered by the Bacchiglione, that the area was already inhabited in Roman times.

Then water came to decide. After the fall of the Empire the territory was abandoned: in the fourth century there had been a violent earthquake, and in 589 came the rotta della Cucca, the flood that overturned the hydrography of the whole Veneto. It was the Benedictines who put the area back on its feet with their reclamation works; at Mestrino they opened a monastery with a hospice attached, which worked until 1384, when after a disastrous fire the nuns abandoned it and moved to Padua. The present parish church, built between 1894 and 1897, is furnished with other people's altars: the high altar was bought in 1938 from the church of San Francesco della Vigna in Venice, with a frontal attributed to Baldassare Longhena and an Annunciation group by Pietro Baratta, while the altar of Sant'Antonio comes from the demolished church of Carturo.