Torri di Quartesolo

The town is named after towers that are no longer there, and the man who made them disappear was the one who owned them. The Vicentines had raised them in the twelfth century to defend their city, at the point where the Tesina cuts the road to Padua and, as Filippo Pigafetta wrote, «loses its name into the Bacchiglione»; the second part of the name is older, and comes from the Latin quartum milium solum, the place that stood four Roman miles from Vicenza. In April 1313 the Paduans took one of the towers and killed all of Cangrande's guards in it, as Albertino Mussato relates; the Scaligeri rebuilt it in 1315, but in 1387 Antonio della Scala, by then on the brink of defeat and sure he could not hold them, had them pulled down himself. From that moment on nobody mentions them again.

The bridge over the Tesina has a crooked story too. Rebuilt in the sixteenth century to a design by Andrea Palladio, on 24 April 1945 it was the target of an Allied bombing meant to slow the German retreat: the bridge came through untouched, while the parish church of Torri was destroyed and had to be raised again after the war. In 1797, when the Napoleonic troops arrived, the village had been sacked and the three settlements of Torri, Lerino and Marola — independent until then — had been brought together into a single comune. Today Torri is above all a commercial hub: the «Le Piramidi» centre, with its hundred and fifty shops in a single block, draws people from all over the Veneto.