Sant'Urbano

There is a hamlet of this comune called Rotta Sabbadina, and the name recalls an act of war. In 1513 the Venetians broke the banks of the Adige there, to flood the countryside and check the advance of the troops of the League of Cambrai: the place still bears the mark of that decision. The town's arms put all of this together — the lion of Saint Mark, which recalls both that event and the reclamations carried out by the Serenissima from the fifteenth century; a green band, standing for the village's position along the left bank of the Adige; and an ear of wheat, because here people have always lived by farming. At the Rotta Sabbadina there remain today a sluice, a hydraulic work now abandoned, and villa Rezzonico.

Sant'Urbano, moreover, is a scattered comune: the town hall is not in the village that gives it its name, but at Ca' Morosini, a few kilometres further on. The territory stretches between the Adige and the low country of Padua, and each settlement has its own parish church: San Gaetano at Ca' Morosini, San Giorgio at Carmignano, of the late eighteenth century, San Giovanni Battista at Balduina, built between 1921 and 1926, and the one dedicated to Saint Urban in the village of that name. Among the manor houses the oldest is villa Nani Loredan, of the early sixteenth century, that is, of the very years when the Venetians were deciding to open the river.