Gazzo

The name comes from the Lombard gahagium, the fenced-in ground — or the sacred wood: the gazzi were enclosed properties, the Germanic equivalent of the Roman curtes, in which woodland, fields and water made a single economic and legal unit. There is still a tree on the coat of arms, and until a few decades ago there was a hunter beside it as well, for the game the woods held. The first document dates from 1187: the clearing had begun, and Pistore, bishop of Vicenza, invested Guido Alberti di Montorso with holdings that lay in the wood of Gazo.

The clearing went on for centuries and turned the landscape inside out: by the nineteenth century the countryside had become almost marsh, and at the time the Veneto joined Italy Gazzo was famous for its rice fields, many of them belonging to the Venetian Diedo family. People lived in casoni with thatched roofs, among rice, fodder, maize, grapes and a struggling silkworm crop, and cattle were the only real resource. Administratively the village belonged to Vicenza until 1853, then passed to Cittadella and immediately afterwards to Padua. Today the springs feed the meadows and the dairy herds that set Gazzo apart from its neighbours' maize; one of them, to the north-east, is called el fontanon del diavoeo, and it is drying up as the water table falls.