Terrassa Padovana

The name of this village records a piece of work, and a violent one at that: Terra Arsa, that is, land cleared in haste by fire. The first certain document is dated 3 November 1097, when one Cono da Calaone made over to the monastery of San Michele at Candiana a wooded territory surrounded by marshes called precisely Terra Arsa — and this is the point: in the very deed that fixes the name, the burnt land is still wood and swamp. The name runs ahead of the landscape, saying what is being done rather than what can be seen. The name of the other half of the comune also tells of a technique: Arzercavalli appears on 25 October 1165 as Arzer De Cavallis, the horses' embankment, because along the navigable canal the boats were towed from the bank by horses, and there is still a via Navegauro today to recall it.

Two names, two trades, and no legend: the fire that opens the fields and the horses that pull the boats. The third name, on the other hand, is a piece of paperwork of the kind found across half of Italy after unification: until 1867 the village was called simply Terrassa, and Padovana was added to distinguish it from its namesakes. The two halves had different masters and it shows: over Terrassa the Bragadin, Venetian nobles, held sway, while Arzercavalli — which kept its ancient name at least until the end of the nineteenth century — remained in the orbit of the Benedictines of Candiana. Two churches still mark the two poles: the parish church of San Tomaso Apostolo, rebuilt in the seventeenth century over a building from the second half of the thirteenth, and on the northern edge the sanctuary of the Beata Vergine della Misericordia, of the fifteenth century, which keeps pieces of the Romanesque pieve out of which it grew. The coat of arms, recognised in 1936 because it was already in use and could be seen on documents earlier than 1875, took its present form by decree of 12 October 1985.