Possagno

Possagno is the village of Antonio Canova, and Canova left it a church that can be seen from far off. He designed the Temple himself, taking the Pantheon of Rome as his model, and had it built at his own expense on a sunny rise at the foot of Col Draga; around the house where he was born, instead, is the Gipsoteca, which gathers sketches, plaster casts and paintings of the sculptor, and whose extension was entrusted to the architect Carlo Scarpa. Canova died in Venice on 13 October 1822, and his contemporaries called him the new Phidias. The village, though, has also lived on clay: the hills round about give a good clay, the kilns have been here for centuries — they are already spoken of in the seventeenth century — and in the twentieth they produced bricks for the whole of Italy, exporting eighty per cent of them. The Coppo di Possagno, the local roof tile, comes from those pits.

Of the first world war, which passed through here, a cross remains: the people of Possagno set it up south of Monte Palon on 5 November 1925, to remember the dead, and since then it has stood over the village. In the second, Possagno took in a few dozen Jewish families, refugees from nearby Croatia and sent here under forced residence; they made friends with the local people, and after 8 September 1943, with the German occupation, the whole village moved to hide them and keep them from being deported, although the area was being combed for partisans. The Isotton family kept the five members of the Garti family in their own house; Fausto Cunial and the young partisan Alessandro Bastianon protected the Errera, Rakover and Gredinger families. For this the Yad Vashem institute of Jerusalem has recognised them as Righteous Among the Nations.