Badia Polesine

The old name of the town was simply La Badia, the abbey, and the abbey was the Benedictine one of Santa Maria della Vangadizza, around which the settlement grew. Around the year 900 the marquis of Mantua Almerigo had it built and then handed it over to the Benedictine monks; it was independent of the diocese of Adria and remained an independent state until the fourteenth century. In the fifteenth its decline began: held in commendam by cardinals until the end of the eighteenth century, at the beginning of the nineteenth it passed to the French family d'Espagnac, and was finally suppressed even as a convent by a Napoleonic decree.

Badia is the last stage of the old pilgrim road called the Romea Annia: those who came from northern Europe and from the eastern countries converged on the important Roman centre of Iulia Concordia — today Concordia Sagittaria — and from there walked more than two hundred kilometres from east to west, across the whole lower Po and Veneto plain, to arrive at this abbey. The river too made the town: after 589, when the Adige broke its banks at Cucca, it abandoned its ancient course and moved further south-west, towards Legnago, Castelbaldo and Badia. In the thirteenth century the settlement was surrounded by a ditch and was entered by three gates; in the coat of arms the towers stand for the three «rocche marchesane» that once rose in the Adige, near the town. In 1928 the comune took in part of the suppressed comune of Crocetta and the former comune of Villa d'Adige, today both hamlets.