Stienta

Almost nothing is told about Stienta: the entries that should explain where the name comes from and what happened here are empty. But the comune does have a chronicle, and it lies in the names of its twenty localities, which set in a row describe in full a piece of plain wrested from the water. Three begin with Argine, embankment — Argine Sabato, Argine Valle Est, Argine Valle Ovest — and they say by themselves that here the land lies lower than the river. Six are called Boaria, which is the building where the oxen and those who tended them were kept, and each carries the surname of a family or the name of a holding: Boaria Guerra, Boaria Roveta, Boaria Varotta, Boaria Gilliola, Boaria Val di Mezzo, Boaria Val dell'Oca. Then there is Chiavicone, the great sluice that regulated the drainage, and Sabbioni, the sands, and Prati Nuovi, the new meadows that came after the reclamation. The town stands on the left bank of the Po, and it is all flat.

The war memorial was made in 1929 by the Paduan Paolo Boldrin. Twenty-seven years later, in 1956, it was Boldrin himself who remade it, with a slight change: an artist coming back to his own work after a whole war and correcting it only barely. That monument can also be seen at the cinema, in a film by Pupi Avati. And there is another ceremony, a less usual one: since 1989, generally on the first Saturday of June, by the church of the Madonna di San Genesio in the locality of Zampine, the fallen who were left without proper burial are remembered, on the initiative of the alpine veterans. In a town whose history is the names of its own embankments, it was decided to devote an anniversary precisely to those who have no grave in which to be remembered.