The ancient parish church of San Marco in Crespano currently survives with what remains of an old bell tower and a rugged stone facade. Built on the Colle de Crespan between the 10th and 12th centuries , it later assumed a parochial function after San Pancrazio, which, according to tradition, became inadequate due to population growth and the inconvenient accessibility of the site.
The first document reporting the existence of ‘San Marco Vecchia‘ as a parish church of the diocese of Padua dates back to 1297. In that year, it was designated with the titles of Saints Pancrazio and Marco – ecclesia S. Brancatii et Martii de Crespano – reserving the place of honor for the older patron saint. A century later, the saintly binomial was inverted, perhaps due to Venetian affirmation in the hinterland, precisely in the first half of the 14th century (1337). The bell tower, whose precarious state was already being discussed in 1599 , was modified with a reconstruction of its summit at the beginning of the 17th century, with the raising of an elegant bell cell that incorporated Renaissance taste. In 1687, San Gregorio Barbarigo, Bishop of Padua, climbed the tower to bless the bells: a plaque commemorates the event. The church served as a parish until the inauguration of the Duomo in 1762, a fact that probably accelerated its decline. The surviving facade housed within it a 15th-century fresco of the Paduan saints Prosdocimo and Giustina, later recovered and restored and now safely located within the sacristy of the Duomo.
The architecture of the bell tower, which forms a single body with the main facade of the church, is a rarity in the Veneto area, where ecclesiastical buildings, even in pure Romanesque style, are separated from the bell towers. The reasons could lie both in the remote origin of the construction and in the unfavorable morphological conditions of Colle de Crespan, which is deeply incised to the north by the Mardijon valley. The bell tower survived several demolition proposals (in 1912 and 1973) dictated by its precarious static situation: its continued existence today is owed to a sensible citizens’ committee that strenuously defended it at the end of the last century.
