Angiari

The name of Angiari means gravel, from the Latin glarea, and it is not an etymology plucked out of the air: here, on the bank of the Adige, there was a river port where the boats came that traded in the gravel gathered from the river bed and used as building material. It served Angiari and the comuni round about, Cerea most of all, and it worked for centuries. What destroyed it was the river itself, with the flood of 1882. The village appears for the first time in 932 as Castrum Anglareii, and then as Anglerei, Anglarei, Anglari; around the year one thousand its name comes back in the donations made to the canons of Verona. The plain was then all woods and marshes, and until the end of the thirteenth century people worked to wrest land from the water.

The struggle with the Adige has never ended. In the fifteenth century new and stronger banks were raised and overflow channels dug for sudden floods; in the following century the wood west of the village was cleared away, and of it only the names of the places remain — Ronco, Boschirolla, Engazzà. Then, in September 1882, the banks gave way right here: the water reached into the province of Rovigo, and in the years that followed came pellagra, malnutrition and the want of work. It was then that many left, and most took the road to South America, above all to southern Brazil. Of the old Angiari there remain the parish church of San Michele Arcangelo, built between 1753 and 1770 over a demolished pieve, the little church of Santa Croce of 1523, restored and given back to the village in 2014, and the fifteenth-century villa Lando-Murnovo, with the remains of the tower, the well and the barchessa.