As we arrive in Fratta Polesine we find ourselves immersed in a very particular atmosphere. We have the impression of opening a small treasure chest from which architectonic gems emerge one at a time.
The Palladian Villa Badoer is the most important: it is included in both the UNESCO and the World Heritage listed buildings. The harmony of shapes, the lounges and the garden are ideal containers for exhibitions and shows. In one of the barns of the Villa is the National Archeological Museum, here built to house the archaeological remains found a few kilometres away. Site of European importance in the Bronze Age, Fratta was one of the most important legs of the ancient Amber Road that developed thanks to the presence of the Po of Adria, now paleo river bed, one of the most important branches of the old course of the River Po. Very close to Villa Badoer is Villa Molin Avezzù where, at a reception in 1818, a group of young Carbonari was arrested and imprisoned in the terrible Spielberg prisons. Fratta is indeed remembered as the first place where Austria started its repression to aspirations to freedom and national emancipation. Every year, in November, a banquet is held in Villa Avezzù to commemorate this event and the whole village is filled with extras in nineteenth-century costumes. In Fratta we can also see the birth home, now a Documentary Museum, of Giacomo Matteotti. Beside the villa, occupying the entire Boniotti building, is the Manegium: a documentation center of peasant civilization and of the whole territory.
Worth a careful visit are also the paintings of the great eighteenth-century artist Mattia Bortoloni that enrich the parish church of SS Peter and Paul.
If we follow the course of the Scortico, a few kilometres away from the historical center, we can find the Eco-Museum of the Pizzon Mill, a wonderful example of industrial archeology.
www.comune.frattapolesine.ro.it
