Canda

The name seems to come from a pre-Roman expression, perhaps Etruscan, can-da, meaning a place to stop: here navigation on the Tartaro ended, the river that from Canda onwards changes name and becomes the Canalbianco. It is the same root found in Samarkand and Kandahar, and it says what the village has always been, a place where one halts. At the beginning of the sixteenth century a small Calvinist community formed here, come from Rovigo: it included Marco Fichente and Giovanni Panciera, a blind lyre player. The Inquisition crushed it right after the Council of Trent.

The village villa was designed by Vincenzo Scamozzi: the nobleman Agostino Nani commissioned it in 1580 and it was finished in 1584. It still has its enclosing wall, the chapel, the stables and a park full of stone statues from the Berici hills; in January 1945, when the schools evacuated from Rovigo had been moved into it, a fire gutted it. Not far away, the little church of the Madonna dei Cuori was built in 1946 as an ex voto for a group of hostages who had escaped the year before: today the expressway runs past it, raised exactly to the height of its roof.