Moriago della Battaglia

Moriago has a name with four explanations and nobody knows which is right: probably it is a prediale, from the Latin Maurellius or Maurilius with the suffix -ācus; or it comes from muri, walls, meaning defensive structures; or from morìa, a dying-off, and then it is tied to the destruction of the old village of Nosledo; and there is a folk etymology that reads it as «the lake dies», because the village is said to have grown up at the edge of a marsh. What everybody does know is the other half of the name. Moriago is on the left bank of the Piave, and the Piave was the front. On the twenty-seventh of October 1918 the troops of the twenty-third Army Corps, under the orders of general Giuseppe Vaccari, crossed the river here and broke through the enemy lines at what has been called the Isola dei Morti ever since: it was the first point retaken on the left bank of the Piave, and it opened the road to Vittorio Veneto. The arms of the comune carry two things only: the old Caminesi tower, still standing in the square although the shells chipped it, and the cippus of the Isola dei Morti.

Ten years later, on the evening of the twenty-sixth of February 1928, a fire broke out in a makeshift cinema set up inside palazzo Battaglia. Thirty-five people died. The parish church was rebuilt in those same years, in place of the eighteenth-century one the war had destroyed: Alberto Alpago Novello designed it, Guido Cadorin painted the dome, and on the high altar there still hangs an altarpiece by Pordenone that the fighting spared. The dedication to Saint Leonard of Limoges says the church is older than the tenth century, from the time of the Franks, even though the parish itself was instituted only in 1569. Moriago appears in writing for the first time in 1112, as Murliago; it became a comune under Napoleon in 1807, was suppressed almost at once and given back to Vidor, and took its autonomy again in 1819, under the Austrians. And in via dei Zanin there is a house that resembles nothing around it: they call it Casa Fungo, the mushroom house; it was designed by Dante Vendramini, an engineer from Moriago who had worked in France for Dassault, and it is built with the techniques and the materials of the aerospace industry — reinforced concrete modules faced with composite panels, two circular floors with the upper one wider than the lower. Vendramini died before it was finished, and the woman who lives there completed it.