Fratta Polesine is a quiet village in the Polesine, the flat, fertile land between the Adige and the Po in the south of the Veneto, and its pride is a villa by Andrea Palladio. Villa Badoer, built in the 1550s for Francesco Badoer, a Venetian nobleman, stands on a raised platform above the surrounding fields, with a temple-front portico, curved colonnades sweeping out on either side to farm buildings, and a grand staircase. It was the first of Palladio's villas to use the curved barchesse, and it is part of the UNESCO-listed City of Vicenza and the Palladian Villas of the Veneto. Inside, the walls carry frescoes, and the villa houses a museum about the Polesine and its history.
The Venetian nobility built villas like this one not as idle retreats but as working estates, the centre of farms reclaimed from marsh, and the Badoer family were part of that great project of land reclamation. The Polesine has always lived with water: the Po flooded catastrophically in 1951, forcing the evacuation of tens of thousands of people.
Fratta Polesine is also the birthplace of Giacomo Matteotti, the socialist deputy murdered by fascists in 1924 after denouncing electoral fraud in parliament. His house is a museum, and his memory is honoured across Italy.
The riding here is flat, open and relaxing. Roads follow canals and riverbanks, through fields of maize, wheat and sugar beet, poplar rows and farm buildings. Traffic is light, but watch out for tractors, cyclists and fog, which can be thick in autumn and winter. The Po delta, to the east, is a vast wetland of lagoons, reed beds and channels, rich in birds. Lendinara, seven kilometres away, has fuel and services, and Rovigo is the provincial capital. Try the local dishes, such as risotto, fish from the rivers and lagoons, and the sweets of the Polesine.