San Biagio di Callalta

The comune's name comes from a road: the Callalta, that is callis alta, because it was built on an embankment. It was meant to take the place of the Roman via Postumia, made impassable by neglect and by the floods of the Piave, and it took over all the traffic between Treviso and Oderzo; from the fourteenth century a new settlement formed along it — what is today the main village — while the old centres of Cavriè and Prandecino declined. It is a village born because a road had changed its course.

On that same road, at Fagarè, stands the ossuary of the Great War dead: it is at the point where, in June 1918, the Austro-Hungarian troops reached the furthest limit of their advance. Beside the ossuary they moved the walls bearing two slogans by the propagandist bersagliere Ignazio Pisciotta, and everyone knows one of them: «Better one day as a lion than a hundred years as a sheep». That war left another mark here too: in the hamlet of Sant'Andrea di Barbarana, on 2 July 1922, Pietro Costante Cardin was born, the last of ten children of a family of landowners and merchants ruined precisely by the conflict. In 1924 his parents took them all away to France, and that child would become Pierre Cardin.