Villa Lagarina

In the documents, from the Middle Ages onwards, this place is la Villa di Villa, the village of Village. In 1190, on the square in front of the pieve, a solemn assembly of the heads of household of the whole comune of Lagaro was held, and there the community and its consuls accused Aldrighetto di Castelbarco of violating the rights it held over Monte Cimone; Aldrighetto accepted the compromise the consuls proposed. Of that trial no direct document survives: it is known from the sworn statements given years later, in another case, by the lords of Castel Nuovo and of Nogaredo.

Those papers certify that at the end of the twelfth century there was a community here able to administer its own undivided pastures and woods, and that it decided in an assembly on that square, where those summoned — landowners, tenants and nobles alike — all had the same rights and the same duties, so much so that the lords themselves submitted to its decisions. The institution that grew out of it, the Comun Comunale, held the villages of the right bank of the Adige together for centuries: it moved its seat from Villa to Pomarolo in 1544, gave itself a new statute as late as 1759, and was abolished only in 1818, by the centralising policy of Austria. On Sunday the fifteenth of February 1456 it was again on that square that the assembly took note of the Lodron invasion, and a notary wrote down what it had decided.