The Roman historian Tito Livio reported that in the plain crossed by the rivers Adige, Brenta and Bacchiglione, in 1184 B.C., the Trojan hero Antenore founded the city of Padua. According to the legend, Antenore was the first farmer to grow the grapevine, a magic plant he had brought from the ancient lands of Asia.
Next to the Venetian Lagoon, once the earth of the Venetian Republic, the Fidora family has been growing the vine in the Civranetta Estate for almost a century.
The estate is situated in the Venetian mainland on the ruins of the Via Annia, an amphibious road (previously Etruscan and then Roman) designed for horse-drawn boats. Far form sea storms, the boats were pulled by horses walking along towpaths built between water and wood.
Those were the lands of the Venetian Foresto: lowland forests grown on Pleistocene arid soils with surface layers of alluvial sediment.
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In the 14th century the Benedictine monks converted the woodland into fertile agricultural soil. The Benedettine Courts were the administrative, economic and social centres of extended properties that, under the guidance of the monks, were provided to local development through land reclamation, the damming of rivers, construction of farm buildings and the processing of land. The cultivation of the vine, already known in Roman times, was widespread in the territory, and the wine produced in the cellars of the Courts became one of the main products of trade that Venice shipped in all ports of the Mediterranean.
Civranetta Estate still keeps the agrarian benedictine division of the 14th century, based on regular rectangular plots of land separeted by ditches. The farm converted into organic agriculture in 1974 in order to ensure biodiversity and the environmental balance necessary to wine production. It is a property of 160 hectares consisting of 80 hectares of vineyards nestled among tree-lined banks, meadows, hedges, copses, and ponds. Biotopes that distinguish the farm and that favour the natural presence of wildlife.
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