Civranetta and the Benedictine heritage
The story of Civranetta is our story. This beautiful estate is located in Venice mainland on the ruins of the Via Annia, an amphibious road (previously Etruscan and then Roman) designed for horse-drawn boats, to carry food and other kind of goods at that time. Far from sea storms, the boats were pulled by horses walking along paths between the water and the woods. Those were the lands of the Venetian Foresto: lowland forests grown on arid pleistocene soil with a surface layers of alluvial sediment.
In the 14th century the Benedictine monks converted the woodland into fertile agricultural soil. The Benedictine Courts were religious, economic and social hubs and they contributed to local development through land reclamation, damming the rivers, building farms and cultivating the land.
Viticulture had been spread in the area since Roman times, and the Courts produced their own wine, which became one of the most traded products in Venice and the Mediterranean.
Civranetta Estate used to belong to a Benedictine Court and it still preserves the agrarian division of the 14th century, which is based on regular rectangular plots, separated by ditches. The property has 160 hectares, of which 80 are covered with vineyards, nestled among tree-lined banks, wild plant, meadows, hedges, copses, and ponds.
In 1974 the farm was converted into organic agriculture and since then the estate has constantly been full of wildlife. You can see pheasants, wild rabbits, herons, wild ducks, foxes and many kinds of small rodents and birds.
It’s something you have never seen before.
