Villafranca Padovana

The name of this village is a tax exemption. Villafranca appears for the first time in 1190, in a document recording the foundation act of the church of Santa Cecilia, and it very probably indicates an area free of duties on goods, already made up of small rural communities trying to escape feudal bonds; the position, on the border between Padua and Vicenza, may have favoured the birth of a centre able to enjoy particular exemptions. Standing on that border, however, also meant standing in the middle: in the Middle Ages the territory was the theatre of the frequent clashes between Paduans and Vicentines, and the long peace came only with the Venetian domination, together with the reclamations, the canalisation and the reorganisation of the farmed landscape.

In 1499 the sanctuary of the Madonna delle Grazie was raised, in memory of the apparition of the Madonna to a mute girl which had happened in 1479; inside there are frescoes of the period that tell the miracle and a late Gothic statue of the Madonna. Of ordinary life it is known that documents of 1827 attest at Villafranca a communal school, a district doctor and the service of the communal guards; and that in the decades before the annexation of the Veneto to the Kingdom of Italy, in 1866, the village was often subject to requisitions of animals and foodstuffs imposed by the Austrians for military needs. Finally there is a railway oddity: despite the name, the station of Mestrino on the Milan-Venice line stands in this comune, in the frazione of Ronchi di Campanile; while the stop that really did carry the village's name, Villafranca-Vaccarino, stood on the Padua-Piazzola-Carmignano line and worked until 1958, when the railway was converted into a bus route.