Pontelongo

The village stretches along the two banks of the Bacchiglione, and the bridge that gives it its name has been rebuilt four times, in four materials: first of wood, then of stone, then of iron, and now of reinforced concrete. The coat of arms, which the comune uses although it was never granted by decree, shows the central span of the old medieval stone bridge and a shrine with the Madonna: the original carved bust, saved when the bridge was destroyed, now stands in a shrine on the church square. Below, a cogwheel with three ears of wheat stands both for the mills of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and for the wheel of the boats that carried the harvests along the river.

The Madonna is there also for the vow made in 1676, when the village was delivered from the plague: since then, on the first Sunday of May, twelve barefoot bearers carry her on their shoulders through the streets, and for the occasion a wooden bridge is built across the Bacchiglione, held up by boats bearing the names of saints. Halfway across, the statue is bowed towards the east. In Villa Foscarini Erizzo, now the town hall, the doge and historian Marco Foscarini died, and his secretary Gasparo Gozzi lived for many years. The sugar factory opened on the twenty-sixth of June 1910 with largely Belgian capital — everyone in the village called it el Beljo — and went on producing until February 2026.