Sedico

Dolphins have come out of these mountains. The territory lies on the boundary between two geological zones, the Trentino Platform and the Belluno Basin, and it keeps the traces of the seas that covered it: the sandstone of Libano, in particular, is extremely rich in fossils, plant remains, shark teeth and above all remains of marine mammals, the odontocetes. From the sandstone quarries of Libano and of Tisoi one hundred and thirty-nine individuals have been extracted, belonging to sixteen species, twelve of which are found nowhere but in the Belluno country. The skeletons of these dolphinoids are kept at the University of Padua and form one of the finest collections of marine mammals in the whole of Europe.

The other extreme of the same comune is the mountain proper: sixty-five per cent of the surface, the whole northern part, has been since 1990 inside the National Park of the Belluno Dolomites, and the highest summit of the park is here, Monte Schiara, which dominates the entire Valbelluna; where the rock is karstic an underground landscape has formed of shafts, fissures, halls, galleries and abysses. Then there is the landslide of Monte Peron, of which one can still read the detachment niche on the wall and the body of the deposit, which today are the Masiere di Vedana and stretch for about four and a half kilometres as far as the locality of Roe Basse. Among the predisposing causes was the rapid retreat of the Cordevole glacier, twenty thousand years ago, but it is not said that everything ended there: according to Giorgio Piloni, who was writing between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, an earthquake around 1114 played its part.