Minerbe

Minerbe has 4,667 inhabitants in the plain of Verona, and it carries the name of a goddess: it was called Vicus Minervinus, and the Romans had raised a temple to Minerva here. That temple stood where the church of San Zeno stands today — on whose walls a Roman inscription can still be read — and tradition tells that it was Saint Zeno himself, preaching, who brought it down. In the fields around the village hundreds of bones have come to light, and it is supposed that in 312 a battle was fought here between the troops of Maxentius and those of Constantine.

The history of Minerbe is written by the Adige. It begins with the rotta della Cucca of 589, the flood that upset the hydrography of the whole lower Veneto, and it continues with centuries of embankments to watch, drainage channels to keep open and rice fields to irrigate — and with the flood of 1776, which the village still remembers. The rest is a list of misfortunes almost comic to read all together: two fires that destroyed nearly the whole village, bands of robbers, the pillaging of the French army, plague, cholera. And the malaria of the rice fields, which struck the children above all: at San Zenone they had to open an anti-malaria colony.