Grigno

North of the Marcesina plain, above one thousand two hundred metres, there is a shelter under the rock that hunters of ibex used in summer and autumn: hearths dug into the ground and ringed with stones, the imprint of a hut and, the most precious thing, a series of stones on which, in red ochre, are drawn stylised animals, geometric elements and human figures. It is the Riparo Dalmeri. Not far off the Grotta di Ernesto, with its hall of the Hearth and its chamber of the Torch, keeps the traces of hunters who passed there in the seventh millennium before Christ. Around one thousand two hundred years before Christ, at the mouth of the Murelo gorge, a castelliere was built — barriers of stone and timber with rough watchtowers — probably by the Euganei, who had withdrawn into the mountains when the Paleoveneti came; renewed several times, it went on working even after the Romans. The village takes its name from the torrent, and the name is pre-Roman: some have recognised in it a root meaning cut, incision.

In 1261 a document assigned the mountain of Marcesina to the villa of Grigno: pasture and timber, which for centuries the village defended against its neighbours' encroachments, by force as well. The Carta della Regola, the community's statute, is of 1592, and it may have been precisely for taking no part in the peasants' war that Grigno kept control of a great collective property made of woods, pastures, fields and marshes. Standing on the frontier of the Republic of Venice, a customs house was set up here, entrusted to trusted men of German origin: from them comes a surname still borne in the village. The frontier made trade lively but exposed the place to fires and sackings, and then there were the floods of the torrent, memorable ones in 1748 and 1882. In the great war the men of Grigno were Austro-Hungarian subjects and were called up for the Central Powers; on the twenty-first of May 1915 the village was cleared ahead of an Italian attack, which came a few days later, and those who had stayed watched the occupiers with mistrust, because their own men were fighting against them. The civilians were then taken away by train towards the Veneto and the rest of Italy. Grigno became Italian on the fourth of November 1918.