Pontecchio Polesine

At the place called Zanforlina, south of Rovigo, excavations have brought to light the pottery of a settlement of the middle Bronze Age, between 1650 and 1450 before Christ: it is the oldest settlement of the middle Polesine, and it stood beside an old branch of the Po, the one called the Po di Adria. The materials say that from here people traded with Emilia and with central Italy. The name of the village, instead, is Latin and means little bridge: Ponticulus, perhaps a real bridge for crossing the Tartaro. It appears as Ponticulo in a document of 753, concerning a donation by the Lombard king Aistulf to the monastery of Nonantola, and in 944 a papal bull lists the Fundum Pontecli among the goods of the Church of Adria: fundus, in those documents, means a great reclaimed farm — which in this country means everything.

In 1054 the bishop of Adria, Benedetto, raised Pontecchio to an archpriestal and collegiate church, that is the chief parish of the area, and gave it to a certain Tarulfo called the Bulgarian, of Ferrara. It was his son, Guglielmo Adelardi dei Marchesella, who founded around 1144 the Este castle on whose ruins stands today villa Grimani, now Borile. In 1482 the Venetians came, and in 1521 the parish was united to the basilica of San Marco in Venice. The archpriestal church of Saint Andrew the apostle was built between 1638 and 1642: a single nave, four side altars, and on the high altar two praying angels under a gilded wooden baldachin. Around the village stand the villas of the Venetian families — Cappello, Foscarini, Erizzo, Grimani — because this was the countryside they lived on.