The church of San Giorgio Martire is the parish church of Cavanella d'Adige, a village of Chioggia near the river Adige. Around the year 1000, in what was then called San Giorgio di Fosson, there was a Benedictine monastery: overwhelmed by the War of Chioggia, it was suppressed in 1429 and many of its records passed to the monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, while the task of saying Mass here was entrusted to a canon of Chioggia cathedral.
What to see
In 1690 the noblewoman Laura Quirini, who owned the land, had a small church built, which on 20 October of the same year became a parish. That church was destroyed during the Second World War by Allied bombing aimed at the nearby bridges over the Adige. The first stone of the present church, designed by the architect Giuseppe Tombola, was laid on 21 July 1949, and the building was completed and consecrated in 1950. The exposed-brick façade has four stone-clad pilasters and a round rose window beneath an arch, above the east-facing entrance.
The bell tower dates from 1935: it was paid for by a fund raised by a local committee to honour the village's dead of the First World War, whose names are carved on a plaque; below it is another, of 1690, recalling Laura Quirini. Of the three bells the oldest dates from 1862. The interior is a Latin cross, with a semicircular apse, two chapels in the transept and a dome on an octagonal drum above the presbytery, with a small painted roundel bearing the initials IHS at its centre. In the left chapel is a mid-twentieth-century altarpiece with Saint George, the symbols of the evangelists and musician angels.
Visiting
The church is in Cavanella d'Adige. Service and opening times should be checked with the parish.
Our editors' tip
Go and see, in the area behind the choir, the eighteenth-century statue of Saint George on horseback, made of different materials including wood and leather.
