Stanghella

The name is documented in 1593 and is a diminutive of stanga, the bar, the fence; some, though, hear ponds in it, and ponds there really were. The coat of arms granted in 1930 says the same thing: the green field recalls the time when the ancient Fossa Lovara ran across the whole area and everything was pools and marsh, the wavy pale is the Santa Caterina canal which, before the reclamation carried out by Venice, passed straight through the built-up centre, the red bands are the rows of vines, and the golden wheel at the base is the attribute of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, the patron saint.

In the middle of the town, in the square named after the partisan Otello Pighin, stands the war memorial carved in 1921 by Virgilio Milani. A man of Rovigo, Milani chose never to leave the Polesine and spent his life carving its dead: after the fallen of Stanghella came the shrine to the Villamarzana massacre in 1947 and, in 1952, the monument to the eighty-four people drowned when the Po broke through. In the same town, inside the library, the ethnographic museum keeps the working tools from before mechanisation: the memory of the lower Paduan plain held in one room.