Borso del Grappa

This town's product is a pea. The biso di Borso is sown between the end of February — ideally at the last moon — and March, without pesticides or chemical fertilisers, and is picked in several rounds from May to mid-June; its seeds are small and tender, its taste sweeter than the common varieties, and some advise eating it raw, without even dressing it. Tradition has it that the peas taken to the Doge and his dignitaries for the feast of Saint Mark, in the famous risi e bisi, were picked on these slopes of the Grappa. And if water fails in the last part of the growing cycle the crop is lost: from that comes the expression «Adio bisi», still used here to say that something serious has happened.

The parish church was badly damaged by the earthquake of Santa Costanza in 1695, which levelled its bell tower; it was rebuilt at the end of the eighteenth century to a design by Antonio Gaidon and then rebuilt again between 1910 and 1929. Inside there is a Madonna between Saints Zeno and John the Baptist, dated 1538 on the first step of the throne: it had been commissioned from the father, but it was the son, Jacopo da Ponte, who actually painted it. At Boscon, finally, grows a beech three metres twenty round and twenty-eight metres tall: it is one of the sixteen monumental trees of the province of Treviso and one of the hundred and fifty in Italy classed as of exceptional value.