Villa del Conte

The earliest traces of Villa Comitis are read in the place names, which recall the Roman presence and the graticolato between Cittadella and Bassano, that is the centuriation within which the village was born; at the end of the twentieth century, in several places, notable Roman finds came to light. What made the fortune of the place, however, is the Tergola, the river that crosses it: it allowed quick links by water with Venice, and for that reason the village first attracted Paduan families and then Venetian ones. Already in the fifteenth century many patrician villas rose here, and some are still standing: the palaces Morosini-Carlon, Zara-Todesco, Dolfin, Sanudo-Piacentini. In the early nineteen-hundreds there was even a place called Malcanton, like a district of Venice, where today there is a crossroads.

The parish church of Saints Joseph and Juliana, a splendid eighteenth-century building on a Latin cross with a single nave, was designed by the parish priest of the day, don Giuseppe Carrara: inside are canvases by Palma il Giovane and by the Friulians Nicola Grassi and Ascanio Spineda, a most refined inlaid tabernacle, statues by Antonio Bonazza and two organs, a Bazzani of 1839 in the loft and a choir organ by the German firm Walcker. At Abbazia Pisani a monument recalls the victims of the nazi-fascist reprisal which on 29 April 1945 put the place to fire and sword, and which culminated in the massacre of Castello di Godego; after the war the town saw heavy emigration towards Germany, Switzerland and Austria. The coat of arms too has a story: the present one, of 1994, has ears of wheat for farming and four bezants for trade and the craft workshops. Another had been proposed in 1938 and never granted, in which one quarter showed the supposed residence here of Jacopo the First da Carrara and the last, plain silver, was to have held a lictor's fasces, in memory of the Roman origin of the village and of the age in which it had been conceived.