Saonara

The name may come from the soil. One explanation derives it from sapo, a particular clayey earth with a consistency like soap: it is a Latin word borrowed from Germanic by way of Gaul, and that would place the name in Carolingian times. The other hypothesis is a plant, the Saponaria officinalis, which is still common in this territory. Either way it is a question of earth, and it is on earth that this place lives: the whole comune is given over to nursery gardening, and at the spring fair the nurserymen build real gardens in the squares of the village, bringing in soil, grass, flowers and plants. The most famous garden, though, is older: villa Valmarana has the romantic park that Giuseppe Jappelli designed in 1816.

In 897 Berengar I gave the Saccisica, and with it Saonara, back to Pietro, bishop of Padua; the village itself is first named as Sabonaria on 9 January 1080, when that donation was confirmed to bishop Olderico. In the documents of that time appear the chapels of Saonara and of Villatora and the monastery of the Muneghette — the name comes from the Venetian munega, that is nun, and of the Benedictine convent no trace is left: the church, which once had three naves, is today a modest single-nave oratory, where the remains of some late fifteenth-century frescoes have recently come to light. Of more recent history, the village remembers the killing of forty-four civilians, among them a child of four, carried out by German soldiers in retreat on 28 April 1945.