Fontanelle

The name comes from the water: the municipality lies on the line of the resurgences, and it is the springs and channels that gave it that name. Before the reclamations there was a wet oak wood here, and the proof turned up in 1952 in the peaty ground of Santa Maria di Palù: a thousand-year-old oak eighteen metres tall and two metres across, a section of which is said to be in the Natural History Museum of Venice. The oldest human traces are stone tools now kept in the museum of Oderzo, left by Neolithic hunters coming down from the Montello. In the Middle Ages Fontanelle was the seat of a parish, with jurisdiction over the churches of Cimetta, Codognè, Fontanellette, Vallonto and Visnà.

From 8 November 1917 to 31 October 1918 the village was occupied by Austro-Hungarian troops. The parish priest of the time, don Saccon, wrote down day by day the hardships of the people in a diary, which the municipality later published in a limited edition of fewer than five hundred copies. A more recent distinction: in the census of 2001 Fontanelle turned out to be the municipality of the Veneto with the fewest unemployed, less than one per cent of the population, among the best figures in Italy. In the northern part of the territory stands villa Marcello del Majno, which in the eighteenth century was the hunting lodge of the Tiepolo of Venice: beside it they had an oratory built to San Saba Stratelate, because the saint's remains, brought from the East, were to be kept there.