San Basilio Museum and Romanesque church

❝The San Basilio station was at the centre of intense trading exchanges between the Mediterranean Sea and the Po Plain hinterland. Built along Via Popilia (the ancient Roman road that connected Ravenna to Adria), this river port played a leading role in the Delta area as a strategic outpost for material and cultural exchange. Today, a small museum tells its story through precious archaeological finds discovered in nearby excavations.❞

The museum exhibits the archaeological finds of a Roman villa and a large village inhabited between the 6th century and the 5th century BC by Etruscans, Greeks and Venetians. San Basilio stood near the so-called Po of Copparo river branch: it occupied a strategic position, close to the coastal dunes, from which to control both river and maritime traffic. The houses of wood and clay housed merchants and artisans of different origins. Goods from all parts of the central-eastern Mediterranean and from Etruria flowed here from where they were then sorted and forwarded on towards the Po Valley interior. It was no accident that in the 2nd century BC, the Romans decided to build an important consular road through this place, the Popilia, that went from Ravenna to Adria. The town of San Basilio thus became the site of an important posting station, the Mansio Hadriani, around which various farms and dwellings were concentrated that constituted an actual village. The excavations, carried out by the Superintendency in Tenuta Forzello, have identified a series of rooms corresponding to a large Roman country villa, which had been renovated several times. The museum, called the Cultural Tourism Centre of San Basilio, exhibits the most interesting finds.
Next to the museum is the church of San Basilio, with its simple but suggestive Romanesque architecture. The church, built in the 9th century by the Benedictines of Pomposa on the same site as a previous structure, presumably built between the 4th and 5th centuries, is considered to be among the oldest places of worship of the Christian community in Polesine.
The church underwent a conservative restoration at the end of the 20th century which restored its original medieval appearance - almost unique in the whole of the Polesine territory. It can be visited and is still in active use. The sacred building has some interesting historical curiosities and traditions related both to the sarcophagus in the churchyard and to an ancient and mysterious marble column. Indeed, it appears that the column, located in a recess next to the apse and repeatedly mentioned in ecclesiastical documents as "miraculous", exuded an oily substance capable of stimulating lactation in nursing mothers. Legend has it that the remains of the French paladins who built the oratory are preserved inside the sarcophagus. In the 14th century the soldiers of Pipino, son of Charlemagne, passed on their way from San Basilio in their attempted siege of Venice.