Bonavigo

Bonavigo lies east of the Adige, in the lower Verona country, and its territory has been remade more than once by water: floods and changes in the river's course have moved the boundaries, and a whole branch of the Adige that ran towards Montagnana simply disappeared. The first written traces of the village are of 887; it was after that time that the Benedictine monks diverted and channelled the Adige into its present course, giving the land stability at last. Among the buildings, the smallest is the one that strikes you most: the sanctuary of the Madonna di San Tomaso, of the fifteenth century, is held to be the smallest in the province, stands on the bank of a raised stretch of the river and has always been spared by the water. Until recently its inner walls were covered with fifty-two ex voto, oils painted on wooden panels: they are now kept safe and shown on feast days. Older still are the pieve of Santa Maria at Ciusara and the church of Orti, given in 1062 by count Milone to the monastery of San Giorgio in Verona.

During the second world war there was a camp at Bonavigo for British prisoners: a few dozen men, who worked on the farms around and were treated according to the Geneva convention. Relations with the village were so good that, when the war was over, some women from here married former prisoners. After 8 September 1943 the prisoners escaped, and it was the peasant families who risked prison and their lives to feed them and hide them from the round-ups and from deportation to Germany. Then, between 20 and 23 April 1945, with the war already over elsewhere, Allied bombing aimed at the bridge over the Adige to block the German retreat: it destroyed the church, the town hall, the schools and most of the houses that gave onto the square. The centre was rebuilt further east, on land given by a local family, and the new church came only in 1955.