Urbana

On the arms of Urbana there is a Roman numeral: a V, and it stands for the Fifth Urban Legion. To its veterans, after the victory at Actium, these lands of the plain were assigned, and from the legion's name the village's name too would come — though some trace it to a personal name, or simply to urbs, the ancient city. The pattern of the Roman centuriation can still be seen, and inscribed stones come back up when the fields are ploughed. The village stands on the rises that the floods of the Adige left among hollows and marshes, and people have lived there since the Neolithic; the name, however, appears for the first time only in 955, in a donation to the monastery of Santa Maria della Vangadizza. On the arms, beside the V, there are the red and black of the ancient Lombard Scodosia and the bell tower of San Gallo.

Saint Gall was an Irish monk, a disciple of abbot Columbanus, and his altar is recalled in a deed of 1188; the church named after him was rebuilt between the two wars over a building of Lombard monastic foundation, and the bell tower stands on the remains of a medieval tower. The other important church is further out: San Salvaro, an eleventh-century monastery dependent on the abbey of Santa Maria delle Carceri, built near the river Fratta and along an old road, and soon a point of reference for pilgrims, travellers and merchants. After centuries of abandonment, in 1995 the parish and the comune bought it in order to restore it: today it houses a priestly school, the parish centre and the Museum of the Ancient Ways. In the countryside there remain the villas Fonseca, Venier and Capodivacca.