Cornuda

Cornuda grew during the barbarian invasions by taking in refugees from the nearby villages who were looking for a more sheltered position, and it grew enough to hold a pieve that was the seat of one of the four archpriestships into which the diocese of Treviso was divided from the end of the eighth century. The first document that writes its name, Cornuta, dates from those years and concerns a very concrete matter: the debts the inhabitants had run up with the monastery of Casier. On the origin of the name the hypotheses do not agree: almost all take it from the Latin cornua, horns, either for the two hills that overlook the town or for the eastern corner of the Roman centuriation of Asolo; others read in it a word meaning crossroads, at the meeting of the via Feltrina and the Piovega.

On the hill to the north-west stands the sanctuary of the Madonna della Rocca, a church built in the later eighteenth century on the remains of the fortress that gives the place its name, joined afterwards by a hermitage for men and later by a convent for women. Its emblem was a very old oak which tradition held had come from the Holy Land: on 18 June 2010 the tree fell to the ground, and in the town it was a blow. In 1848, meanwhile, the fields below were a battlefield of the Risorgimento, with the Austrians defeating the papal troops and the volunteers who supported them; and it was the Austrians too who brought here the railway that made Cornuda a junction between the plain and the foothills.