The name is a saint cut short: San Donato d'Arezzo, venerated along the lower Piave as early as the eighth century. But the saint's church San Donà no longer has: in 1250 a flood shifted the course of the Piave and carried the chapel to the other bank. The village stayed on this side, «San Donato de qua de la Piave», and the one that grew around the chapel, over there, is today the comune of Musile di Piave. The river cut a saint in two. Then Venice added its own share, diverting the bed again in 1664: the Piave Nuovo still splits the territory into two sectors.
Here you stand below sea level, and the land was wrested from the marshes by pumping stations: the Museo della Bonifica, the only one of its kind, tells the story, and on the main square the palace of the reclamation board stands where elsewhere the town hall stands. The town you see is all new: after Caporetto the front stopped on the Piave, and when the Italians came back, on 31 October 1918, almost nothing of San Donà was left. From here came Giannino Ancillotto, who to bring down an Austrian airship flew straight through it and came out alive. Rebuilt in the twenties around Piazza Indipendenza and the neoclassical duomo, it is now the service capital of eastern Veneto: Jesolo and Eraclea a quarter of an hour away, Venice half an hour by train.
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📅 Every year, on the Monday after the first Sunday of October, with the Fiera del Rosario the preceding week
San Donà di Piave celebrates Our Lady of the Rosary on the Monday after the first Sunday of October, with the traditional Fiera del Rosario, popularly known as «Le Fiere»; some trace its origins to the victory of Lepanto, consecrated precisely to the Virgin of the Rosary.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside San Donà di Piave, but an easy day trip away.
