Under the fields of Frattesina lies one of the most important protohistoric sites in Europe. The first finds came up in the nineteen sixties, then came eleven excavation campaigns directed by Anna Maria Bietti Sestieri on the Gabriele-Casari holding; and in the two thousands, during works to reorder the drainage of a basin, a vast necropolis of the eleventh to ninth century before Christ appeared at Narde. What came out of the ground can be seen in the national archaeological museum, and the museum is in the barchesse of Villa Badoer: so the Bronze Age is kept in the farm buildings of a villa by Andrea Palladio, built in 1570 and today a World Heritage site. The first written news of the place is of 1054, when the bishop of Adria, Benedetto I, obtained the fief that included this territory, then called Villa Comedati; the bishops built a castle here, and around that castle bishops, Veronese and Este fought fiercely, destroying it and remaking it, until it passed to the Pepoli and its last stones disappeared at the beginning of the eighteen hundreds. Under Venice, Fratta became a summer place for the Venetian nobles, and that is why a village of this size has so many villas.
Fratta has been the scene of two political deaths a century apart, and it has kept them both. In 1818 came the tragedy of the Carbonari della Fratta, the first example of Austrian repression of the aspirations to liberty and to national emancipation; and when the Veneto was at last free, the monument that in 1867 the Veronese sculptor Grazioso Spazzi dedicated to them was the first of its kind in the liberated Veneto. That same year the village added Polesine to its name, to be told apart from the other Frattas. In 1885 Giacomo Matteotti was born here; on the tenth of June 1924 the fascists killed him for having denounced Mussolini's electoral frauds, and after a solemn public funeral in the parish church he was buried in the village cemetery, where he still lies. In December 2017 the house where he was born, now a museum, was recognised as a national monument.
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📅 Every year, on 29 June
Fratta Polesine celebrates Saints Peter and Paul on 29 June. In November the town re-enacts the Carbonari revolt of 11 November 1818, culminating in a costumed parade through the historic centre.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Fratta Polesine, but an easy day trip away.
