Cavaso del Tomba

The second half of the name is barely a century old: «del Tomba» was added by a royal decree of 1922, just after the Great War, in memory of the fighting that had taken place on Monte Tomba. After Caporetto the village found itself on the front line, was half destroyed and had to be evacuated: the refugees could only come home at the beginning of 1919. The first half of the name, on the other hand, is twelve centuries old and has nothing to do with war: it appears in a document of 780 by which the cleric Felice gave his daughter some land «in loco Capati», and then in two charters of the eleventh and twelfth centuries as de Cavaso and de Cavasio; behind it there would be a Latin personal name, Capatius.

Since the Middle Ages the pievania of Cavaso was a kind of federation, and they called it the Università: it was made up of eight comuni, which are the present colmelli less one. Passing with Treviso under Venice in 1388, it grew rich on wool, and it even prospered during the war of the League of Cambrai because it lay out of the way of the battlefields; what really damaged it was rather the earthquake of Santa Costanza in 1695, which brought down the market place as well. In the church of San Martino, at Castelcies, there is a stone with a Latin inscription of the second century before Christ, one of the oldest documents of the Treviso country. In the Second World War Cavaso was a theatre of the Resistance: thirteen partisans arrested during the operation called Piave were hanged. The town hall, incidentally, is not at Cavaso but in the hamlet of Caniezza.