Pettorazza Grimani

The comune is small but it has two parishes, and the reason is the river: the Adige made an enormous loop here, and the land caught inside the bend lay on the left bank, under Padua, while the land outside it belonged to the Venetians, and in particular to the Grimani, who gave the village its name.

Between 1654 and 1772 the river broke its banks eight times at this very spot; the loop was cut through between 1782 and 1784, and in the sanctuary of the Madonna delle Grazie the ex-votos of those floods are still kept. From the air the old meander can still be seen, and with it a strip of ground some thirty metres wide that draws a figure of eleven sides: nobody has yet worked out what it was.