Miane

When the descent of the barbarians undid the order the Romans had given to this piedmont country, one thing stayed intact: the ecclesiastical division into pievi and chapels. From it were born the pieve of Santa Maria of Miane, which depended on Treviso, and the chapels of Visnà, Vergoman, Combai, Campea and Premaor. With the arrangements of the following centuries those chapels took the name of regole, and each was placed under the government of a meriga backed by two jurors, while the pieve became the centre of the Comune. The order stayed unchanged until the fall of the Serenissima: what cancelled it was the Napoleonic period and then the Austrian one, which replaced the regole with a communal Deputation. The eponym, it is supposed, was a certain Aemilius, a Roman veteran — which fits a village born as a pagus a short way from the Claudia Augusta road.

The most interesting things here have been found by the restorations. The bell tower of the archpriest's church, as was discovered in recent times during works, had been built in the fifteenth century as a watchtower, clearly part of a wider defensive system, and was turned into a belfry only afterwards; in 2013, while work was going on at the little church of Sant'Antonio abate at Vergoman, frescoes of the fifteenth century came to light. At Forca the old prisons of Valmareno still stand, called here the Presòn, with two vaulted cells lit by the narrowest of windows. And then there is the Capitel Vecio: the story goes that around 1100 the Madonna appeared to a group of shepherds asking for a small temple, and that one of them carved the statue immediately after; but the frescoes on the walls look older than the statue, so the story does not add up and nobody has managed to date the place.