Baone

Between the eleventh and the thirteenth century the Este, while they were still at Este and before moving to Ferrara, kept their court in the safer castle of Calaone, during the ferocious wars with Ezzelino and with the Paduans. And in those years, before the Paduans destroyed the castle for good, Calaone drew minstrels from all over Europe, who climbed up here to sing their poems to the noble Este ladies. Seven centuries later, in September 1904, on the hills next to Ca' Barbaro, the pioneer Aldo Corazza made what is recorded as the first Italian aeronautical flight: a few hundred metres of gliding, aboard a biplane glider he had built himself.

At the place called Salarola, a few steps from Calaone, there are the ruins of the first community to which the blessed Beatrice the First d'Este withdrew; at Valle San Giorgio stands instead Villa Beatrice d'Este, the former monastery on Monte Gemola where the blessed spent several years until her death — and where later another Beatrice d'Este, queen of Hungary, took refuge after the death of king Andrew the Second. The Ezzelini were tied to this place by two marriages, and their properties here are known in detail for a not very cheerful reason: they were meticulously ascertained, censused and documented after their final defeat in 1260. The baths of the Val Calaona were an important centre of wellbeing throughout the nineteenth century, but they were in such a state by the time of the Great War that the establishment closed in 1921, and since then that resource has remained unused; a former quarry, on the contrary, has become a botanical garden. The thing Baone is proudest of today, though, is a vegetable: in 2018 the comune set up its register of municipal denomination of origin, and in 2019 the first product entered in it was the bisi, that is the peas.