Fregona

In 1509, during the war of the League of Cambrai, a group of men from Fregona recruited by Francesco Forte freed Serravalle from the troops of Maximilian of Habsburg. Venice wished to reward them, and did so with a ducale: a parchment granting the community numerous privileges, and still today kept in the town hall. Those privileges stayed in force until the fall of the Republic, in 1797 — nearly three centuries of advantages earned in a single night. The comune's coat of arms, which no decree has ever formally granted, still carries that day: two silver swords crossed with golden hilts, behind a red castle with Guelph battlements. The swords are Serravalle; the castle is the Caminese fortress of Piai. Fregona, incidentally, is a comune sparso: the municipal seat is in the hamlet of Mezzavilla.

On the name the sources lean towards the Germanic — an anthroponym, or the torrent Friga — and reject as a paretymology the derivation from the Latin frigus, cold; but they go further still, suggesting that the toponym may recall an ancient sacred area dedicated to Frigg, the Germanic goddess of fertility, in the centuries of Gothic and Lombard rule. They add that the veneration of pagan cults among those peoples is also the basis of the legend of Saint Augusta, who is said to have been born here, at the castle of Piai, the daughter of a pagan king named Madruch: and in the comune there is a small lake called Madruc. The parish, first cited in a papal bull of the twelfth century, once covered a territory far larger than today's, and it lost it a piece at a time: Cappella Maggiore split off in 1494, Montaner in 1600, Osigo in 1865 and Sonego in 1951. In the territory there are also the Caglieron caves, which are half a natural gorge and half old quarries from which they cut the sandstone the locals call piera dolza, and the Bus della Genziana, one of the rare cases of a speleological nature reserve. Here they make the torchiato, a wine from dried grapes, and a cheese called moesin that exists only in this comune.