Piombino Dese

The name of this village may come from a bird. Piombino should be related to the Latin plumbum, lead, but it is hard to establish why: perhaps it alludes to the colour of the soil, perhaps to the kingfisher, which is also called piombino for the way it dives. The Dese, instead, is one of the rivers that cross the comune, together with the Zero, the Draganziolo, the Marzenego and above all the Sile, which rises from springs precisely in this area: the whole territory lies inside the regional nature park of the river Sile. Human presence along the Sile is very ancient and became intense in the Bronze Age, when the first spaces for farming and pasture were torn from the woods; of the Paleoveneti, on the other hand, there is no trace, probably because at the end of the Bronze Age the area turned to marsh and was abandoned. The Romans set it in order again, and still today roads and ditches follow the regularity of the ancient centuriation of Altinum. The first written mention of Piombino is in a bull of pope Eugene III of 1152, among the appurtenances of the pieve of Trebaseleghe.

The main monument is villa Cornaro, designed by Palladio and finished at the end of the sixteenth century, a UNESCO world heritage site. It belongs to the season in which Venice, having left its trading activities towards the East, put its capital into the agriculture of the mainland: it was the patrician families, and the Cornaro first of all, who financed between the sixteenth and the eighteenth century the great hydraulic works that regulated the Sile, the Zero, the Dese and the Marzenego. At Levada stands villa Marcello, still of the Marcello family, with six hectares of park and a ballroom frescoed by Giambattista Crosato; Victor Emmanuel II lodged there in 1866 and Victor Emmanuel III in 1918. And then there is the bell tower: built in 1717, fifty-four metres high, it is one of the tallest buildings in the area, and the basilica of Saint Anthony in Istanbul was built on its likeness.