Cessalto

The sources do not agree on the name: for Dante Olivieri it is a compound of cessus, remote or hidden, and alto, high; others read caesus saltus, the cut wood, or cessus saltus, the far wood; and some trace it to the Latin used by the monks of a nearby abbey. In the documents it appears as Villa Cesalti in 1242. Cessalto calls itself the town of the wood, and the wood is exactly what it has kept losing: the Olmè and the San Marco were once a single lowland forest, the comune bought them in 1891 together with that of Chiarano, and today the Olmè is down to a little over two hundred thousand square metres while three or four hectares are all that remain of the San Marco, the rest cleared and turned to fields.

An older river used to run under the village: digging the wells, at about twenty-three metres, a metre-thick layer of coarse alluvial gravel was found, which is the old bed of the Piave, the branch that came back with the flood of 589 that upset the hydrography of the whole Veneto. In 899 a Hungarian army crossed the Livenza, probably over the Roman bridge of the Via Annia near Sant'Anastasio; the bridge was destroyed and only its foundations remain. In 994 Otto III gave the bishop of Ceneda everything that lay between the Livenza and the Piave as far as the sea, the castle of Cessalto included: it passed to the Da Camino and was destroyed without a trace, perhaps in 1386. The Piavon, made navigable by the Caminesi, linked the patricians' villas to the lagoon, and one of those villas, Villa Zeno, is Palladio's.