Torre di Mosto

Torre di Mosto has 4,739 inhabitants in the lower Venetian plain, and it built its name in two stages. The tower is the defensive one raised on the Livenza around the fifth century, when the barbarians were coming; the rest arrives much later, because in 1411 the village and the tower were destroyed in the Hungarian invasion, and it was the Venetian patricians da Mosto who put them back up.

For centuries all this was marsh — a system of swamps that joined the lagoon of Venice to that of Caorle — and the village stayed a poor farmers' settlement on the edge of the water, with malaria and the floods of the Livenza. Things began to change in 1815, when the Austrians made the embankments safe; then, from 1871, the real reclamation came, finished only after the First World War, which gave back more than three thousand hectares of land to farming. The people who worked it left after the Second World War, when machines replaced arms, and the village only started growing again in the seventies.