Cinto Caomaggiore

The name seems to come from ad quintum, that is from the fifth mile counted out from Concordia Sagittaria, which was the most important centre in the area: a town called after a measure of distance from another city. In the surrounding countryside the scholar Vincenzo Gobbo has recorded eleven settlements of the Roman period, small farms and country villas that lived alongside the great forest. But the find that counts is at the locality of San Biagio, and it is not a building: in little more than a century that spot has given up over six thousand silver denarii, a quantity the source calls incredible and which makes a tiny locality one of the most important and most mysterious archaeological places in all eastern Veneto. Why so much silver ended up there, nobody knows; the coins are today in the national Concordia museum at Portogruaro, together with a Neolithic green-stone axe.

The rest of the territory has been written by water and gravel. The ground lies between six and eight metres above sea level, and the lowest part keeps the place name Palù, marsh, in memory of the water that used to stand there; it is crossed by resurgence rivers and a network of canals, one of which, the San Piero, is the old course of the Reghena and takes its name from a small church it runs past. From the twenties to the sixties of the twentieth century gravel was quarried here in successive campaigns; then the pits flooded, and the holes left by the digging became the lakes of Cinto, a wetland that today hosts one of the most important heronries in the Veneto, with grey herons and cattle egrets, night herons and pygmy cormorants. The comune as an administrative body, by contrast, was born of a decree of 1806.