Fiumicello Villa Vicentina

The comune was born on the first of February 2018 from the union of Fiumicello and Villa Vicentina, and it is worth saying how. At the referendum the yes votes outnumbered the no votes, but the favourable majority was reached only in Fiumicello: in Villa Vicentina the no won, with fifty-two and a half per cent. The regional commission took account of the overall result and the comune was made all the same; the seat is the old town hall of Fiumicello. The name of the smaller place tells of another merger, one that went badly and then well: it used to be called Camarcio, and the name alluded to rotten ground, that is to marshland. In 1466, after the Turkish raids, Venice sent here the Gorgo family of Vicenza with a group of settlers to build fortifications and repopulate the area, and from then on Camarcio has been called Villa Vicentina: it carries the name of the province the settlers came from.

In 1817 the famine was such that the year earned itself the name of the year of hunger. The year after, the counts Gorgo, fallen into disgrace, sold everything to Elisa Bonaparte Baciocchi, Napoleon's sister, forced into exile after her brother's fall: she made it her summer residence and died here, in 1820. The estate, which included a silk mill, went on with the family; her daughter, left without heirs after her own son's suicide, sold it to Napoleon III, who assigned it to his son; and when he too died, in 1879, the whole property was divided among its fifty employees. In that villa, between November 1869 and July of the year after, stayed Louis Pasteur, who was looking for a remedy against the muscardine of the silkworm, a disease that was ruining Friuli and half of Europe. Three hundred metres away there is a little neo-Gothic chapel, built by Elisa's daughter to bury her only son, who died mysteriously.