Canaro

The name comes from the reeds that grew in the marshes of this area. The place is documented from 1082, but what has marked its history is the river: the Po breached and overflowed so often that a whole settlement near by, Villa Lerizza, disappeared in 1168, and the church of one of the hamlets had to be rebuilt at the end of the fifteen hundreds because a breach of the Po had destroyed the one of 1289. In 1482 the war between Venice and Ferrara reached this far, the one they called the salt war: Canaro had to be taken because of where it stood, and by the end of the fighting, two years later, it was badly damaged.

In one of the hamlets, which is called Garofolo, stands the birth house of Benvenuto Tisi, the painter known as il Garofalo: the hamlet carries his nickname, and a locality near by is called simply Ca' Benvenuto Tisi. In the church of Santa Sofia there is a marble Last Supper of the seventeen hundreds, attributed to the school of Canova, which had been made for a church in Venice; a dark vein came out in the white, and so it ended up here. The town theatre is the former house of the fascist party, rebuilt. And in front of the town hall there is a bronze Pietà of 1924 for the dead of the first war and, since 2007, a monument to the dead of Nasiriyah.