San Giorgio in Bosco

Between the sixth and the seventh century a small church was built here to San Giorgio, the warrior martyr and protector of the weak whom the Lombards held as their patron along with the archangel Michael and Martin of Tours: the name, in short, already tells you who was in charge of this plain. The wood came afterwards. In 1803 the Paduan historian Andrea Gloria notes that in the hamlet of Paviola there was a wood of twenty campi belonging to the Obizzi family, and that the archpriest Anselmo Panizzon worked hard for the clearing and improvement of the land, so much so that he earned a certificate from the Society of Encouragement. The coat of arms granted in 1954 puts the two things together quite literally: the saint on horseback killing the dragon, and an uprooted tree, for the land taken from the wood.

On these fields Napoleon won two battles against field marshal von Wurmser, on 19 September 1796 and 15 January 1797. But the day the municipality remembers is another one. On 29 April 1945 a group of retreating Germans rounded up thirty-nine citizens of Sant'Anna Morosina and made them walk as far as via Cacciatora, at Castello di Godego, where they were killed together with other victims. In 2015 the municipality of San Giorgio in Bosco formally asked Germany for compensation for that massacre.