Sorgà

The comune as we see it now was drawn in 1813 by the Napoleonic land registry. Before that, under the Republic of Venice, each of these places had its own political and administrative shape and they were separate from one another; and they did not even belong to the same masters. The vicariate of Sorgà was a fief of the Veronese monastery of Santa Maria in Organo until 1571; Pontepossero was a fief of the Venetian patricians Grimani; Bonferraro depended on the vicariate of Nogara; Moratica was a fief of the abbey of San Zeno; and Pampuro lay inside a Mantuan vicariate, that is, in another state. The monastery of Santa Maria in Organo had come by Sorgà through three ninth-century donations: the will that Eugalberto, son of Grimoaldo of Erbè, drew up on the twenty-eighth of May 840, that of the subdeacon Tendiberto, and later the bequest of everything a certain Venerabio owned here. Under the Scaligeri those goods were repeatedly usurped, so much so that the abbot had to beg the Visconti, the new lords of Verona, to be allowed to recover them.

The longest story, though, is that of Pontepossero. On the seventh of May 1411 Nicolò Grimani bought the fief and the castle from the condottiero Taddeo Dal Verme for twelve thousand five hundred gold ducats, with the jurisdiction, the tolls, the tithes and all the attached rights; a few years later he made a will establishing an entail in favour of the male line, and the family held on for centuries, dividing into branches and going on buying land all around. Then those purchases and — the source says as much — a not very prudent management in a period unfavourable to the old landed nobility brought the Grimani to an unsustainable burden of debt. In 1831 Leonardo Grimani had to sell the Curtalta estate, and on the sixteenth of September 1846, after four hundred and thirty-five years of his family's power, he had to sell Pontepossero as well. The village's name, meanwhile, comes from sorghum, grown here so widely that the plant became the symbol of the place and ended up on its coat of arms; the water of the Tione makes this rice country, with more than one festival devoted to risotto. And here was born Antonio Ascari, the racing driver, father of the champion Alberto.