Patron saint festival In 300 days
Saint Lawrence, patron of the Risorgive springs
📅 Every year, on 10 August
San Pietro in Gu celebrates Saint Lawrence on 10 August.
San Pietro in Gu has 4,576 inhabitants in the plain north-west of Padua. The first half of the name comes from the monks: the village appears in a document of 1191 as "villa de Sancto Pietro in Gudi", property of the Benedictine monastery of Santi Felice e Fortunato of Vicenza, even though the patron saint later became San Lorenzo. On the second half, that "Gu", nobody has managed to agree: it might indicate a ford on the Brenta, or come from the Latin gualdum, which means wood, or from the German gute, a holding. That water mattered in these parts is shown by the name of one hamlet too, Barche, "boats": the story goes that a branch of the river ran through the middle of the village, and that people went along it by boat.
The most repeated episode, however, is from two centuries ago. Canon Gian Maria Sale left it in writing that Napoleon Bonaparte climbed the bell tower of the parish church to watch from up there the fighting with the Austrians along the Brenta, and that on that occasion he slept at Villa Negri-Rigon. That bell tower is gone: in 1815 lightning damaged it so badly that it was demolished, and the one you see now was built between 1816 and 1819. In the First World War, on the other hand, the closeness of the Asiago plateau brought here an airfield and a munitions depot.
🎉 Festivals and feasts in San Pietro in Gu 1
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Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
Near San Pietro in Gu
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Places to see within 25 km
Outside San Pietro in Gu, but an easy day trip away.
Chiesa di Sant'Ignazio di Loyola 📍 Carpi · 11 km Jesuit church of 1670-1682 in Carpi, on a Greek-cross plan, with scagliola altars and the diocesan museum. Basilica cattedrale di Santa Maria Assunta 📍 Carpi · 11 km Carpi cathedral begun in 1514 to Peruzzi's design, reopened in 2017 after the 2012 earthquake. Chiesa di Santa Maria in Castello 📍 Carpi · 12 km Romanesque pieve of 1184, the oldest church in Carpi, with a Peruzzi façade and twelfth-century frescoes. Chiesa di San Bernardino da Siena 📍 Carpi · 12 km Patron church of Carpi, begun in 1604, with the reliquary bust of Saint Bernardino of Siena.