Zero Branco

Here it is the village that gave its name to the river, and not the other way round. Zero appears as Zayro in 1095, then as Zero in 1152 and as Iairus in the Middle Ages, and from the name of the territory came that of the watercourse, which passes right under the main square. On the origin of the name three explanations compete: Dante Olivieri takes it for a prediale, that is the memory of a landowner called Iarius or Diarius; Giovan Battista Pellegrini brings it close to Zadro, a Paduan place name, and derives it from theatru, a place where a theatre stood; a third hypothesis ties it to the cerro, that is to a tree. Branco, on the other hand, was one of the colmelli of the village, the one that happened to host the seat when the comune was set up, and should mean «branch»: probably a ditch or a canal.

The parish church is named as a pieve in a bull of pope Eugene III of 1152, and was rebuilt and reconsecrated on 17 August 1642. The bell tower was begun in 1696 and legend has it that it was built to a model taller than the one of nearby Mogliano Veneto. Inside are kept a Madonna del Parto signed by Palma il Giovane, a Sacra Conversazione attributed to Vittore Belliniano and a San Sebastiano by Cosroe Dusi, known as «the painter of the Tsars» for his long stay in Saint Petersburg. The oldest building in the village, though, is palazzo Sagramora, Venetian gothic of the fourteenth century, with mullioned windows and traces of frescoes: first the seat of a confraternity, then a hospice for pilgrims passing through the Marca Trevigiana, today restored but closed and partly abandoned.