Fonte

Fonte is a scattered municipality: the town hall does not stand in the place that gives the comune its name, but in the hamlet of Onè. The name, very common in Italy, means a spring, and it is water that made this area at the foot of the Asolo hills habitable, where Neolithic people sheltered in the caves and where watercourses are close together. In Roman times the territory belonged to the ager of the municipium of Asolo, and the regular layout of some of the roads still preserves the pattern of the ancient centuriation; the importance of the area grew with the building of the road that linked Asolo to Padua.

What remains from that period is above all funerary, and the best known piece is the gravestone of Velleius, a stele with the portraits of the dead man and of his wife — the latter now lost — today kept in the civic museum of Asolo. Then the name of Fonte turns up again, along with many other places in these foothills, in the inventory of the Ezzelini's properties drawn up after the family's defeat, in 1260. In the nineteenth century, when Asolo was the head of a canton, the present comune was included in that of Asolo. In its territory there are seven Venetian villas: Malombra, Muttoni, Pasini, Salomon Pisani, La Staglierona, Persicini and Rinaldi.