Valera Fratta

For centuries Valera was two Valeras. Between about 1170 and 1200 the Cistercian monks of Chiaravalle bought pasture and woodland here and founded a grange, a large well-equipped farm that they ran themselves, a few hundred metres south of the village that already existed. From then on a distinction was drawn between Valera Nova, or Fratta, which was the grange with the houses around it, and the older Valera Zucca, that is Vetula, the old one. The first record of the name is of 1209. Unification came first in church, from the middle of the sixteenth century, when all the inhabitants were recognised as parishioners of San Zenone; but the Austrian censuses of the eighteenth century still counted Valera Fratta with 440 souls and Valera Zucca with 215.

Recent history is that of a village emptied and then filled again. In 1971, when Italian industry was at its height, only 687 inhabitants were left at Valera: the countryside was emptying and nobody was coming back. Then the movement reversed, and between the nineteen-eighties and nineties the village began to grow again, passing a thousand inhabitants in 2001; today there are about seventeen hundred, steady for years. Under all of this there is still what was here at the start: a Roman rustic villa, that is a farm, with its own necropolis.