Trevignano

The chief town is not where the name is. Trevignano is a comune sparso: the town hall is not in the locality of the same name but in nearby Falzè, at the crossing of the two provincial roads, and the four localities recognised by the statute — Trevignano, Falzè, Signoressa and Musano — are strung along those roads. The name is a prediale, that is the memory of a landowner: a Trebinius, with the suffix -anus. In the nineteenth century the village depended on Montebelluna and, with the whole of the Veneto, belonged to the Austrian empire; the roads arrived before the railway, with the Pontebbana completed in 1851, the same year the station of Treviso was opened, while the Treviso-Montebelluna line, with the station of Signoressa, was only finished in 1886.

Why the people left, the local history says precisely. When the steamships began to bring, quickly and cheaply, American and Ukrainian grain from the Black Sea, silk from China and Japan and rice from India, the competition became unsustainable for Venetian farming; living conditions grew worse and the poorer classes went to seek their fortune in distant countries. Emigration was the wound of this place, and the two world wars only made it worse. The new century, though, had opened with two buildings in which the community could recognise itself: the bell tower of the church of Signoressa and the town hall at Falzè. Today the land still gives cereals, vegetables, fodder, vines and fruit, and the factories make shoes: Lotto and Stonefly are from here.