Conegliano

Conegliano may well be named «the king's road». The oldest written form of the name, Colinglane, is of 1016, and the most convincing hypothesis derives it from the Germanic Kuning, king or war leader, and Lane, road: the royal, or at any rate military, road that ran through here, whose name came to stand for the village grown up at the foot of the fortress. It is not a fanciful idea: when the Roman cities of the plain — Aquileia, Altino, Oderzo — were destroyed, communications shifted to the foothills, and in Lombard times the Piave valley held together Cividale and Pavia, Germany and the Po plain. The road that runs from here to Dobbiaco was called, in the Middle Ages, the Via Regia. The other hypotheses are more modest: the tunnels of the castle, or the estate of one Cornelius.

The castle, which was the centre of both civil and religious power, was already a ruin in the seventeen hundreds and was taken apart for building material: out of the castle they made, among other things, the town hall. The cathedral, for its part, has no facade: it is wedged between the houses of the contrada, and what you see is the portico of the Scuola dei Battuti, covered by what is reckoned the largest mural fresco in the Veneto — a book painted on the street, sixteenth-century, the work of Pozzoserrato. Inside is the Pala di Conegliano of 1492, the only work by Cima da Conegliano left in the town where he was born. Then there is the wine: here in 1876 opened the first school of oenology in Italy, still running, and from here starts the first wine road the country ever had. In June they play the Dama Castellana, a game of draughts with the pieces in Renaissance costume — and the source is honest: it is not a centuries-old tradition, it was invented not long ago, and it became a tradition anyway.