Isola della Scala

The town refused a name, and won. It was called Insula Cenensis because the marshes of the Tartaro isolated the villages, then it was Isola dei Conti after the Sambonifacio, then in the thirteenth century the Scaligeri strengthened the defences on the river and left it the name it still bears. When Venice arrived the name was changed to Isola di San Marco, but it did not take: the inhabitants went on using the old one and restored it as soon as the domination ended. The coat of arms preserves both passages: the three marsh reeds rising from the water were the only figures in Venetian times, and beside them the Scaliger ladder has come back.

The whole history of the place is a history of water. In the Middle Ages it was the Benedictine monasteries that reclaimed the fields, then the Venetian families built the hydraulic works, and from the seventeenth century rice began to be grown on the land wrested from the marsh. The oldest document that speaks of the pieve bears the date 20 July 1011, and the town lies near the estimated epicentre of the violent earthquake that struck Verona in 1117. The sanctuary of the Bastìa, finished in 1126, stands on a rise believed to have been a bastion: until a few decades ago people told of underground passages running from there to the ossuary of the cemetery, but the panels under which the opening was supposed to be were walled up during some maintenance work, and the story can no longer be checked.