Ponte San Nicolò

The bridge that gives the village its name is no longer there. In 1130 a chapel dedicated to Saint Nicholas, protector of sailors, was built on the river bank, and the two sides were linked by an oak bridge; in 1228 it was rebuilt in stone, with three arches — the three arches that today can be seen only on the town's coat of arms. The bridge went through a good deal: Cangrande della Scala's armies camped beside it while besieging Padua, thousands of refugees fleeing the city crossed it, and in 1509 the siege of the emperor Maximilian destroyed it. After the flood of 1907 the stone one was pulled down, and in 1913 the metal one that stands there now was inaugurated.

Here the river was a road. Between the main village and Roncajette there were floating mills and a river port, where boats docked laden with salt, flax and terracotta ware. Roncajette, which in the Middle Ages was called Roncaliutari, means a place of brambles to be grubbed up with the billhook; in its church there is a fourteenth-century polyptych with the Madonna and saints in ten compartments, the work of a painter known only as the Master of Roncaiette. At Roncaglia, instead, stands villa Crescente, which the mayor Cesare Crescente — later mayor of Padua — had built for himself complete with a false turret, and which after years of neglect has reopened as a study hall and library.