Tezze sul Brenta

The Brenta, here, disappears. Along this stretch its bed widens to almost a kilometre, and the water often vanishes beneath the stones to re-emerge further downstream. The village's name, on the other hand, comes from haylofts: teze, in the local dialect. There have been many floods, and the one of November 1966 carried away the bridge linking Tezze to Friola: so as not to leave the road cut, the military engineers built a footbridge, later blown up when the new Ponte della Vittoria was finished. The remains of that footbridge can still be seen in the riverbed. Until the nineteen-sixties the river was navigable; then gravel extraction lowered and widened its bed.

The boundaries here are unusual too. The hamlet of Laghi is cut in two by the border between the provinces of Vicenza and Padua, and lies half in Tezze and half in Cittadella; Cusinati is divided between Tezze and Rosà; and Granella is surrounded on three sides by Cartigliano. The village is first named in 1374, in writings on the history of the Treviso march, but became a comune only in the Napoleonic age: before that, under Venice, it was a villa of the autonomous podesteria of Bassano, terra exempta et separata from the jurisdiction of the other cities and subject directly to the Republic.