Pressana

Before it was called Pressana, this village was called Sule, from insulae, for the sandy islets of the Adige which then ran through here, and Quari, for the fords on the river: two names that say the same thing, namely that there was more water here than land. In 589 the breach of the Cucca embankment changed everything: the river took another road and the territory stayed a marsh for four hundred years, good for boats and flat-bottomed rafts. Dry land, here, is a decision: the reclamation began around the tenth century, willed by pope Agapitus II and carried on by the Benedictines from 950, and turned a set of islands between two rivers into farmable countryside. The sources say it without circumlocution: that artificial state is still the state of things today.

The present name, by contrast, comes from a Roman noble, Persius, and what has remained of the Romans is subtler than stones. After the battle of Actium, Octavian assigned these lands to the veterans of the eleventh legion and the territory was centuriated; the buildings were erased by the marsh, but the grid survived in the names of the roads — via Carbon from cardo, via Carobale from cardo vallis, via Calmaora from callis major. The place name Pressana appears for the first time on 3 April 1169, in a deed of donation to a monastery that speaks of the fields of prexane and of rovereto, forty-eight in all. In the Gazzo wood, moreover, the knights of Saint John kept a hospital for pilgrims bound for the Holy Land, one day's ride from Verona; when the pilgrimages ended, those buildings passed to the Venetian Querini, who according to some built there the first Venetian villa on the mainland.