Porto Tolle

This land was made by a canal. Between 1600 and 1604 the Republic of Venice, worried that the silt carried by the Po would end by filling in the lagoon, carried out the Taglio di Porto Viro: a great hydraulic work that diverted the river from Taglio di Po into the bay of Goro through a canal twelve miles long. From that cut new land emerged, and the Republic assigned it to a number of Venetian patricians: that is why the places of this comune bear their names — Ca' Venier, Ca' Tiepolo, Ca' Vendramin, Ca' Farsetti — families who saw to the reclamation and built here large manor houses for the summer and for shooting. Today the comune is made of three islands surrounded by the Po and the Adriatic, and it is the largest in the province and the second in the Veneto after Venice.

The name comes from a small wooden landing that some fishermen built in the eighteenth century: the «porto de le tole», the port of the planks. The comune, however, was called San Nicolò until 22 April 1867, when the council resolved to change it. In the night of 10 August 1849, in the flood meadow of Ca' Tiepolo, Angelo Brunetti known as Ciceruacchio, his two sons and five other patriots were shot: they had left Rome with Garibaldi to reach Venice, which was still holding out against the Austrians, and had gone on north alone after Garibaldi stopped near Comacchio at the death of Anita. The comune's main square carries Ciceruacchio's name. Today the fishing that has always kept this place going is in trouble: since 2023 the blue crab has devoured the clams, and the fishermen's consortium at Scardovari has lost more than six hundred members.