Sant'Elena

Sant'Elena was given away as a dowry. Born as a pile-dwelling village before the Romans, and then land shared out to the veterans of Actium with the centuriation of the Atestine countryside, in the Middle Ages it appears among the properties of the Corte Elisina, together with Solesino, which takes its name from the court, and then Stanghella, Granze, Vescovana, Barbona and Concadirame. The whole court was part of the very rich dowry that in 1126 duke Welf II of Altdorf assigned to his daughter Cunizza so that she could marry Azzo II d'Este. The name, on the other hand, is that of Constantine's mother, who by legend brought back a relic of the Cross from the Holy Land, and it appears for the first time in the will of the marquis of Este who died in 1193, among whose executors were the priors of the Benedictine monastery of Sant'Elena.

For centuries there was a single monk here. In 1479 pope Sixtus IV united the monastery to the Olivetans of San Benedetto Novello in Padua, and in 1489 bishop Barozzi found Sant'Elena inhabited by one monk alone, rector of the church, for about a hundred souls: and so it stayed until the Napoleonic suppression of 1797. The church had become a parish in 1574, was given its bell tower in 1627 and was rebuilt between 1820 and 1831, consecrated in 1836. What changed the village was work: in the last decades of the nineteenth century Gaspare Andolfo founded here a kiln among the most important of the Bassa Padovana, using the Hoffmann method patented in 1858, the one with the fire that never goes out; the Padua-Bologna railway arrived, and at the beginning of the twentieth century a tramline joined the station to Este, making the village a place of passage for people and goods. The kiln closed in 1968.