Terrazzo

The river, here, was not there. In the last period of the Bronze Age, between 1400 and 1200 before Christ, a stable and organised population lived on the territory of Terrazzo, reckoned at three or four hundred people, and the landscape differed in one decisive thing: the watercourse was missing. The Adige came later, with the rotta della Cucca of 17 October 589, when it changed its course and began to flow past here. What had been fertile land safe from flooding became a great unstable marsh, the territory was abandoned until the tenth century, and it took three or four hundred years before it looked again like the land of today. The most important finds came out in via Brazzetto in the nineties, while the primary school was being built.

The name probably comes from the old Venetian torazo, that is a great tower: in a church document of 1145 the place is Turracii, and the tower — a fortification of about the twelfth century, inside a historic villa of the village — is the one on the arms recognised in 1931. In 1234, during Ezzelino III da Romano's action against Legnago, the fighting here was precisely for that stronghold. Begosso, on the Adige, appears in 932 in a donation to the chapter of the cathedral of Verona, and in the seventeenth century it had a port fitted for the gravel barges and a much used ferry, until in 1813 the Austrian troops destroyed the port; in its place there remained a small ferry, nicknamed la Finanza, and useful it was, since otherwise one had to go twelve kilometres round to the bridge at Legnago. The bridge over the Adige at Terrazzo came only in 2008. In 1630, meanwhile, the plague brought by Dutch soldiers stationed at Mantua had struck a land already in famine.