Bassano
Town
82 I
Approximately 125 km east south-east of Calgary.
This community was named by the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1884 for one of their major shareholders, Napoléon Maret, Marquis de Bassano. His wife, Lady Bassano, née Marie-Anne-Claire Symes, was a native of the province of Quebec. Bassano was the site of a major dam, as part of the CPR's irrigation scheme, and led to the slogan "the best in the west by a dam site." It is the second largest dam of its kind in the world, exceeded in size only by the one at Assuan or Aswan, Egypt, which holds back the waters of the Nile. (Place-Names of Alberta, 1928; Holmgren's Over 2000 Place Names of Alberta, 1976)