Villanova Marchesana

The history of Villanova is all in one spot, on the embankment of the Po, where church has followed church on the same ground. The first is of the late thirteenth century, with its font and the cemetery beside it; but the land yielded little and the river broke its banks again and again, so much so that the friars who lived there had to leave and the building was abandoned. It was put back on its feet by the monks of the Certosa of Ferrara, founded by Borso d'Este in the mid-fifteenth century, who were granted its patronage: with more money the church grew, and by the mid-sixteenth century it served fifteen hundred people.

Then came the plague, which cut the population to about eleven hundred souls; the bell tower was finished all the same, in 1665. The church consecrated in 1608 in turn fell into decay and was pulled down: the one there now, inaugurated in 1788, stands on its foundations. Inside it there was a Madonna della Salute by Scarsellino, lost in a fire in 1968. On the outer wall a plaque recalls Cardinal Giacomo Lercaro, who came here in November 1951 with the flood of the Polesine: he took some of the boys back with him to Ravenna so that they could go on studying, and kept them in the archbishop's house.