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April 1999

Veneto - Padua

David Aaronson
2005-09-23 23:43:31

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On Monday morning we headed out of Milan, which takes quite a while as none of the autoroutes come particularly close to the city center. Our first stop was the village of Capriate San Gervaiso on the banks of the Adda river. Just outside of this town is a village called Crespi D'adda. Not exactly highly touted in most tourist guides, it was designed at the end of the 19th century as an 'ideal working town'. The centerpiece is a cotton mill along the river which is where all of the residents of the town worked. Houses fill up the center of town with the managers' homes being slightly larger and slightly farther out of the center of town. The main road contains everything that was considered necessary to keep the residents happy: a co-op store, a church, a school, a park, a castle built specifically for this town, and the mausoleum shown here, as a monument to the city's founder.

Each home designed for a worker and his family was exactly the same - a two-story cube-shaped home set in the center of a square lawn with plenty of room for a garden. Today, the mill is used in part as a factory and people still live in the town. The homes can be seen in this photo in a variety of colors.

After Crespi, we continued on to Padua stopping along the way at an Autogrille. Autogrilles are placed every few miles along Italian highways and despite warnings from Italian friends to avoid the food there, we found the panini to be exceptional. (Well, compared to anything you'd find at an American rest area.) Arriving in Padua, we promptly got lost and spent some time driving around in circles (literally). The major difficulty is the wide plaza shown here. On maps, and in reality it is called the 'Prado della Valle'. We translated this as 'meadow of the valley', and thus we continued looking for a huge meadow basically. Eventually we figured this out.

Just off the Prado della Valle ...

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