Campolongo Maggiore

The villa that belonged to the boss is today the village's house of associations. Confiscated from the mafia, it holds the Casa delle associazioni «Cristina Pavesi» and the Museum of legality; the name is that of the woman killed on 13 December 1990 during the assault on the Venice-Milan money train. It is the way Campolongo Maggiore has chosen to answer the hardest part of its recent history, that of the so-called Mala del Brenta, born here between the nineteen-sixties and seventies and led by Felice Maniero, who was born in the village. A building taken from the man who built it and given back to the people who live there: the choice is written on the sign.

The rest of the comune's history is made of shifted boundaries. In the Napoleonic age Liettoli, Campolongo and Bojon were three small comuni of the Brenta department, that is of today's province of Padua; in 1807 they were transferred to the Adriatico department, which is today's metropolitan city of Venice. With the coming of the Lombardo-Veneto kingdom, in 1815, the three were merged into a single comune, called Campolongo, which after the annexation of the Veneto to Italy became Maggiore. The last hamlet, Santa Maria Assunta, was created only in the nineteen-nineties, following a parish set up some decades earlier to serve the eastern edge of Bojon. Between the chief town and Bojon, meanwhile, runs the Cunetta Brenta, which is the river's present main branch.