San Vito di Cadore

In 1752, to end a quarrel over the high pastures with Ampezzo, which was then under the Habsburgs, the authorities decided as follows: the men of San Vito were to build for themselves, at their own expense and in ninety days, a boundary wall nearly two kilometres long and one metre eighty high. They did it, and they kept the pastures of the Giau. The wall is still up there, and with it a good many boundary crosses.

The little church of the Difesa was built to fulfil a vow, after the fight that in the winter of 1411 stopped Sigismund of Luxembourg's troops at Cimabanche; and in its late-Gothic apse there is a fresco painting that very fight. The altarpiece is by Francesco Vecellio, Titian's brother. The mountain, though, has more than once presented its bill: in 1814 a landslide off the Antelao buried two hamlets, and the dead were about three hundred.