Garibaldi square

Piazza Garibaldi owes its name to the leader Giuseppe Garibaldi who visited Legnago the year after the unification of Veneto to Italy. On the day of his arrival in Legnago (10 March 1867) the general stayed at the Paglia hotel which overlooked what would become Piazza Garibaldi. The building was destroyed during the bombings of the Second World War. The Frattini family, who owned the structure, donated the original furnishings of the room in which Garibaldi had slept to Maria Fioroni, which can now be admitted to the Fioroni Foundation Museum, in the room dedicated to the "hero of the two worlds". On the facade of the building rebuilt from the rubble of the old hotel, however, a plaque commemorating the event remains.

The square, born as an internal open space serving one of the urban gates of the sixteenth-century walls of Legnago, has become, since the end of the nineteenth century, the heart of the city. Indeed, 1887 was a capital year for the urban history of Legnago. The demolition of the first section of walls between Porta Mantova and Porta Ferrara marked the beginning of a real building revolution. Piazza Garibaldi, once Porta Mantova was demolished, was extended to form a course of about two hundred meters, the current Corso della Vittoria. In memory of the demolitions, two walled inscriptions remain on the building in the southwest corner of the square. It is also possible to 'virtually' follow the structures of the urban gate by means of the design of the pavement, made with different colored pavements (the white follows the walls of the building, the pebbles the watercourse that flowed outside the walls and on which passed the entrance bridge into the city).

In 1924 the so-called “palazzone” was completed, the first apartment building in Legnago, which still today, after surviving the bombings of the Second World War, stands out at the end of Piazza Garibaldi and ideally closes the scene. In front of it in 1986 the fountain was placed with the imposing abstract sculpture depicting the sun signed by Giò Pomodoro.