Lamon

In 1836, in a crevice of the rock near San Donato, at a place called Coronini, a silver chalice was found. It bears an inscription in fine capitals saying, in Latin, that of God's gifts the deacon Ursus made an offering to Saint Peter and Saint Paul. It is of the sixth century, and it is the oldest object of its kind in the whole Christian West. Who that Ursus was is disputed: for some a deacon in itinerant service, whose chalice was kept in the cathedral of Feltre and hidden when the Lombards came; for others a piece too fine for a small see, come from Concordia or Aquileia, looted and then concealed along the road. What seems certain is that somebody hid it on purpose, and that is why it has reached us intact. The road along which it was hidden is the Via Claudia Augusta, traced by Drusus and made up by Claudius, which here is still called the pagan road.

In the seventeenth century they derived the town's name from Castrum Ammonis, from a supposed cult of Jupiter Ammon on the hill of San Pietro that nobody has ever proved. The likelier origin is far humbler: the word lama, that is a pond, and also ground liable to slide. Geology agrees with it, because the plateau of Lamon is a great lake that filled up little by little at the end of the last glaciation, fifteen thousand years ago. In the cave of San Donato bones of Ursus spelaeus, the cave bear, have been found: a skeleton, put together from the bones of several individuals, now stands in the entrance hall of the town hall. And in 1997 the pupils of the middle school, searching in the hamlet of Guana, turned up arrowheads, scrapers and sickle blades belonging to Neolithic farmers. For the rest Lamon is known above all for two things it still does: the bean and the sheep.