Spresiano

In the spring of 569, at the crossing of Lovadina, the meeting is said to have taken place between the Lombard leader Alboin, just down from the Julian Alps, and Felix bishop of Treviso: Paul the Deacon tells it, and the bishop, he says, was able to move him to pity enough to spare the property of the diocesan church from plunder. The ford on the Piave was an obligatory passage between the Treviso country, the Conegliano country, Friuli and the lands beyond the Alps, and for that reason armies have crossed this territory for centuries; the road of the pilgrims bound for the Holy Land was called via Ongaresca, after the raids of the Hungarians who travelled it the other way. Lovadina, which was the first and most important settlement of the area, was already a military stage on the routes of the legions and later a court of Berengar and Adalbert, kings of Italy, who in 958 gave it to Rambaldo di Collalto.

The river, for centuries, was the only trade possible. From the woods of the Cadore and of the Montello timber came down in rafts as far as the sea; from the gravel bed lime stone was quarried, with the carting and the kilns that went with it; for the rest, wickerwork and cooperage. Then, at the end of the nineteenth century, the Lazzaris works made Spresiano an Italian leader in the timber industry: on the eve of the First World War nearly a thousand people worked there, and around the factory grew consumer cooperatives, mutual aid societies, workers' quarters bought by instalments and a patronage for the training of the young. The village's name, meanwhile, comes from a farm: the vicus precilianus, the field of Precilius.