Arcade

The name speaks of water held back: it is said to come from the arches raised in antiquity to protect the land from the floods of the Piave. A fief of the Collalto, from the end of the fourteenth century Arcade passed to Venice, and those were the years of the villas; then came the French and the Austrians, with the damage done by billeted troops, and from the end of the nineteenth century a poor countryside sent the people of Arcade to America, to France, to Switzerland, to Australia. In 1960 the comune made itself smaller: Giavera, Cusignana and Santi Angeli left to form Giavera del Montello.

The Great War, here, did not pass nearby: it stopped inside. In October 1916 the Arcade airfield was set up as a squadron training centre: it began by training the 79th and put together nineteen more. After Caporetto, in the first days of November 1917, the field became a revolving door, with units landing and taking off again after three or four days; on the first of November the trenches were four kilometres away. When the front settled on the Piave it was abandoned as too close to the enemy and kept only for emergency landings: it was still listed as an emergency field in 1921, and it closed in 1924.