Polverara

On the left bank of the Bacchiglione stands a square tower, six metres to a side and some thirteen high, which everybody calls the colombara, the dovecote. A dovecote it was not: whoever has read its constructional character says so bluntly, because a building with so noble a ground floor — four arches on corner pillars, a cross vault, four metres forty of free height at the centre — is not made for pigeons; it served as a lookout tower. What it was really built for, though, is written on its north face, the one turned towards the monastery: a stone clock. The mechanical clock was a bulky machine, made of weights, winches and gearwheels, and to work it needed free height; it is the clock that explains the old holes visible on the first and second floors and the singular arrangement of the load-bearing structure. Perhaps the clock came after the tower, but almost certainly the tower was built to contain it. Today the tower stands among one-storey sheds where the owner daily works as a blacksmith, and the comune would like to give it back its clock.

That tower is all that remains of the monastery of Santa Maria della Riviera, which a document of the nineteenth of March 1230 places here and which was the first settlement in northern Italy of the Benedictine congregation of Monte Oliveto, until then present only in Tuscany, Lazio and Umbria. It had fifty-two rooms on two floors, a church, four courtyards and a walled ground cultivated partly by the monks and partly by the local peasants. Around 1770 the Serenissima suppressed monastery and church, and the following year a Venetian nobleman bought them. Polverara itself is first spoken of in 1130, when the bishop of Padua confirmed to the cathedral the possession of the church of San Fidenzio — and legend has it that the church was raised on the exact spot where the saint's body was found, pointed out by that same bishop after a vision. In 1276 the village became a podestaria, and from then on the sources record the wars and the damage of the pensionatico: the right of neighbouring shepherds to pasture their flocks freely, even inside other people's property.