Silea

This comune changed its name to stop being laughed at. Until 1935 it was called Melma, after the watercourse of the same name, and the first historical act in which the Comune di Melma appears goes back to 1172. On 21 January 1935, by royal decree number one hundred, Victor Emmanuel III authorised the change to Silea, referring to the Sile, the main river of the territory, of which the Melma is a tributary; the request had come from the podestà, Matteo Fantin, on 5 September 1934. The criterion was one of semantic similarity — still a river, in short — but the real reason was another: to avoid the mockery that the old name brought upon the inhabitants from the neighbouring villages. The rivers, all three, have stayed in the coat of arms as blue pales: the Sile, the Melma and the Nerbon, with ears of wheat to recall the milling of cereals that the abundance of water made possible.

Water here is not a detail, it is the address. Villa Valier, of the second half of the sixteenth century, was built by the Barbaro with its facade turned to the Sile, and a long stairway ornamented with statues and vases goes down to the landing stage on the river. In the frazione of Sant'Elena the church was built in 1478, as the now undecipherable inscription on the portal used to say, and of the original building the facade in great blocks of stone probably remains; the bell tower was begun in 1547 and finished three centuries later, with the cusp of 1891. At Cendon, instead, the bell chamber of Santi Vittore e Corona holds the bells brought here from the church of the Pietà in Venice. And again at Sant'Elena there is a fishing museum, made with the sport fishing federation, dedicated to river catches and freshwater species.