Villadose

Villadose has 5,188 inhabitants in the central Polesine, cut in two by the Adigetto. The land still keeps the drawing of the Roman centuriation that stretched between Adria and Rovigo, and since 1990 the museum that tells its story has been inside Ca' Patella, the town hall: there the ground-floor windows are in Ferrarese style and those of the upper floors Venetian, the mark of two dominations one above the other. In 1484, when the salt war between Venice and Ferrara ended, the village passed from the Este to the Venetians.

After the unification of Italy the flood of 1882 and the farming crisis drove many people away: by the end of that decade Villadose had the highest emigration rate in the Polesine, more than a quarter of its population gone to South America. On 25 April 1945, against the cemetery wall, the Germans shot twenty partisans captured at Ceregnano, and immediately afterwards two militiamen of the Black Brigades who had assisted them in the operation; two people survived.