Ceregnano

The history of Ceregnano was written by water. In 1438 the whole territory was submerged when the Adige broke its banks at Malopera and Castagnaro; at the end of that same century a fire destroyed the village, and a few years later yet another flood arrived. Stability came only in the sixteenth century, with Venice and the embankment works of the first reclamation consortia: here political stability and hydraulic stability arrived together, and that is not a figure of speech.

In November 1951 the Po submerged almost the whole of the Polesine. At Lama Polesine some eighty people stayed behind, among them Amedeo Braghin, who one evening, taking his boat towards Fasana, saw a bulky object floating beside a tree that he could not make out in the fog. He thought about it all night and went back at first light: it was the second of December, and what he pulled out of the water was a wooden crucifix without its cross. Appeals in the newspapers never found an owner. On that spot the sanctuary of the Cristo dell'Alluvione was built, dedicated to the victims of floods everywhere in the world.