Porto Viro

The name comes from a basket. A «viero», in these parts, is the big wicker basket kept under water to hold fish alive, eels above all: there was a fishing village here that served as a live store for the community of Loreo, and from that came Porto Viro. The place then became famous for a piece of hydraulic engineering: the Taglio di Porto Viro, with which in 1604 the Venetian Republic diverted the Po to stop the lagoon of Venice from silting up. Around the villas the noble Donà and Contarini families had built for themselves two villages grew, Donada and Contarina, which the bishop of Chioggia made independent of Loreo — Contarina in 1665, Donada in 1680.

The comune, on the other hand, died and rose again. In 1928 the two towns were joined into a single comune on the initiative of admiral Luigi Arcangeli; in 1937 a royal decree divided them once more, probably because Adria was beginning to fear their weight. It took fifty-eight years: on 1 January 1995, after a referendum, Porto Viro came back into existence, and on the arms the lion carries above it the letters C and D, the initials of the two villages. In between had come the flood of 1951, which submerged the Polesine and drove a great many people away, and the extraction of methane, which lowered the ground so much that it had to be stopped.