Quero Vas

Quero Vas lasted ten years. It was born on the twenty-eighth of December 2013 from the merger of Quero and Vas, approved in a referendum in which those in favour were ninety-four per cent at Quero and seventy-seven per cent at Vas; it gave itself a coat of arms chosen by public competition, with a river that is the Piave, a bridge to say the union of two communities the river divided, and a grey heron, which in heraldry stands for attention and for alliance in the face of danger. Then, on the twenty-second of January 2024, it merged in its turn with Alano di Piave, and the comune that came out of it is called Setteville: whoever looks for Quero Vas today finds a name the registers no longer use. The territory lies where the Piave leaves the Belluno country and slips into the corridor between the Grappa massif and monte Cesen, the narrows of Quero.

Those narrows were controlled with a chain. Around 1376 the Serenissima's captain Jacopo Cavalli had Castelnuovo built, which served for centuries as a customs post: two towers, the larger with machicolations and the smaller resting on the riverbed, and from this last a chain stretched to a tower on the opposite bank, regulating the passage of boats. After the war of the League of Cambrai the little fort decayed and changed trade several times: first an inn, then a hotel, finally an oratory of the Somaschi fathers. And here the story closes on itself, for that order had been founded by vow by Gerolamo Miani, after he had been miraculously freed from imprisonment in that very castle, during that very war. East of the town is the German military cemetery, where more than two hundred soldiers of the German alpine corps and over three thousand Austro-Hungarians lie.