Rosà

The name of Rosà is disputed between the water and the flowers. One explanation derives it from roxata, that is a roggia, an irrigation channel, and points to the canal that Francesco da Carrara had dug in 1336 to water the countryside south of Bassano; the other from rosada, from the roses flowering along that same channel. The comune has chosen the second: on the arms there are roses. The channels, though, remain the thing that made the village: dug between 1360 and 1370, they take their water from the Brenta at the Ponte Nuovo of Bassano and then divide into the Rosà, Munara, Dieda, Vica, Balbi and Moresca. Today their core is protected inside a rural park, the Parco Civiltà delle Rogge.

It was that land reclamation that gave birth to Rosà. Once drained, the countryside became a matter of dispute with Bassano, and the community formed first around the votive chapel of Sant'Antonio, in 1450, and then definitively as an autonomous comune in 1533. Earlier still, two Roman roads had passed through here: the via Postumia, ordered in 148 BC by the consul Spurius Postumius Albinus to link Genoa with Aquileia, and the via Aurelia, which ran from Padua to Asolo and Feltre. The Roman centuriation can still be read in the layout of the town's streets, which bear names like via Romana and via Colosseo.