Villa Estense

At Villa Estense there is the museum of the vanished villages. It documents the settlements of the Bassa Padovana that had once had some importance and then emptied out, above all in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, until they were abandoned for good. The village that houses it changed its own name too: it was called Villa di Villa until 1867. It appears in 1077 in the list of goods that the emperor Henry IV confirmed to Ugo and Folco I d'Este, and from there the documents follow one another: the donation of 4 December 1139 by Azzo V and Folco I to the monastery of Santa Maria delle Carceri, that of the marquis Bonifacio to the same monastery on 12 April 1140, a confirmation by pope Lucius II in 1148, and on 19 April 1177 the confirmation of Frederick Barbarossa to the monastery of the Vangadizza, from which the extent of the pieve at that time can be drawn: it took in Carmignano, Passiva, Ancarano, Corezzo and Finale.

The tower on the arms is gone too. The arms, granted in 1927, show the old tower that stood here until 1865, when it was pulled down; on its foundations the new bell tower was raised in 1894. The parish church, on the other hand, the villagers got by decree: on 27 April 1793 the senate of the Republic of Venice handed over to them the church, by then crumbling, and at the beginning of the nineteenth century they rebuilt it with a single nave and seven altars, keeping the dedication to Santa Colomba which had belonged to a religious building now vanished, of which nothing remained but a rise in the ground with a trachyte cross upon it. At Grompa stands Santa Rantua, wanted in 1364 by Ubertino da Grompo, whose name is probably a mangling of Santa Rotunda. On the war memorial by the sculptor Gino Vascon a cippus was added for Nella Pastorello, a partisan killed in 1944 in the Vercelli country.