San Pietro Viminario

The name of this town is half church and half trade. San Pietro comes from the parish church, dedicated to the apostle; Viminario comes from the vimine, that is from the thin flexible shoots of the willow, the ones that grow along the ditches and banks of this plain and are woven into baskets and hampers. Here that work was done so well that the town was famous for it, and it has kept the name even now that the baskets are no longer needed. The church that gives it the other half of the name, with its convent, goes back to the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

The other centre of the comune is Vanzo, and there are two things there worth the journey. The first is the church of San Matteo, which is a national monument. The second is villa Giustiniani, of the Palladian school: it was built in the second half of the seventeenth century by the Venetian patricians Giustiniani, but they did not start from nothing, for they enlarged a building that had stood there since the second half of the fifteenth century. The territory is entirely flat, in the low Padua country between Conselve and Monselice, a land of ditches and wide fields: exactly the place where the willow grows by itself.