Santa Giustina

Santa Giustina lies in the exact middle of the Val Belluna, halfway between Feltre and Belluno, and it is the point where the Cordevole enters the Piave as its largest tributary. From the riverbed to the peaks the municipality climbs almost 1900 metres, up to the 2187 of its highest point, and it takes in a piece of the karst plateau of the Piani Eterni inside the national park of the Belluno Dolomites. In between lie the hills, where the last glaciation left plainly visible moraine deposits. A secondary branch of the via Claudia Augusta Altinate ran up there, along the hills, and not along the valley floor: the Piave and its floods were not to be trusted.

The name comes from a church that changed place. There were never any large settlements here, and what held people together was the pieve, a union around a church that ended up counting in economic and administrative matters too; the oldest one on record was that of Formicano. Between the end of the thirteenth century and the beginning of the fourteenth the pieve was moved to the church of Santa Giustina d'Ignano, because Ignano stood more centrally in the territory and housed a chiericato, a school for clerics. The municipality bears the name of that move. In 1422 Venice ordered instead that every castle in the Feltre territory be pulled down.