On the second half of the name there are two explanations, and both are good. In the comunal territory cross the cardo maximus, today the regional road of the Santo, and the decumanus maximus, today via Desman, of the ancient centuriated Paduan countryside: according to a hypothesis of Enrico Nestore Legnazzi the «pertiche», the rods, of the place name are the instruments with which the Roman surveyors traced the centuriation, kept afterwards inside a temple as sacred objects, once the work was finished. The second theory is later and Lombard: the rods would be those of a burial ground, long poles surmounted by images of birds which served to commemorate those who had died far away, with the bird turned towards the place of death. From that period comes also the church dedicated to Saint George, a warrior saint very dear to the barbarian peoples, and around the church the village probably formed.
From the donation of Berengar I of 911, confirmed by Frederick Barbarossa in 1161, the area was a lordship of the bishops of Padua. Towards the middle of the eleventh century bishop Bernardo had a stronghold built beside the church, with four towers, ditches, earthwork and a ring of walls, and there, in 1222, bishop Giordano received cardinal Ugolino of Anagni, sent by pope Honorius III to gather the funds for the fifth crusade. The Venetians demolished the fortress in the fifteenth century: a single tower is left of it, raised so many times over the centuries that it has become the bell tower, thirty-eight metres high with sides of six and its base made of Roman and Lombard bricks. The meeting, instead, has remained in the coat of arms, granted on 18 December 1951: the mount with the cross stands for Calvary, that is Jerusalem, the mitre for the two prelates, the bezants for the money of the expedition.
