Riese Pio X

The town keeps the empty coffin of a pope. Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto was born here on 2 June 1835 and in 1903 became Pius X; in 1944, when his body was exhumed and found incorrupt, the sarcophagus left free was brought to Riese and placed for good in the parish church of San Matteo. The house where the pope had been born was given to the comune in 1926 by his sister Maria, and it still holds the family's household things: it is a national monument. The comune's official name was lengthened in 1952, in his honour. The coat of arms too, of 1928, is his: the lion of Saint Mark in the chief, which the patriarchs of Venice used by tradition, and the anchor in a stormy sea, which is Christian hope — and the anchor, in its turn, came from the arms of another man of Riese, cardinal Jacopo Monico, also patriarch of Venice.

The territory is split in two by the nature of the soil: to the east reddish, permeable and therefore arid land, made farmable only after the digging of the Brentella di Pederobba in 1436; to the west the alluvial deposits of the Muson, fertile and full of water, and it is there that nearly all the ancient finds have come to light. The names are Roman: Riese from a Resius, Poggiana from a Paulus or Popilius, Vallà from a vallum, that is an entrenched camp. In 1917, after Caporetto, the front on the Grappa and the Piave came close and trenches were dug along the Musone; in the Second World War the partisan brigade «Martiri del Grappa» was commanded by Primo Visentin of Poggiana, called Masaccio, gold medal for military valour, who rests in the cemetery of his own hamlet.