Valdobbiadene

Under Venice this territory administered itself, and in a curiously modern way. From the middle of the fourteenth century Valdobbiadene was divided into fifteen rural communities called Regole, and governed itself through the Merighi, men elected from among the heads of families: a semblance of autonomy inside the Serenissima's political power, but with real procedures. The Regole disappeared with Napoleon and with the Austrians, replaced by comuni: first three, then two — Valdobbiadene, San Pietro di Barbozza and Bigolino, which lasted only a few years; in 1929 San Pietro di Barbozza too was absorbed. The boundaries of this territory had been fixed much earlier, in 1116, when the emperor Henry V, come to Treviso to settle the usual quarrels between the town communities and the rural ones, received the local notables in special audience.

The name comes from Paul the Deacon, who in the Historia Langobardorum calls Duplavilis the birthplace of the poet and hagiographer Venantius Fortunatus: probably two branches of the Piave, and from that Val di Dobiadene. The coat of arms, on the other hand, has nothing to do with the history of the place and admits as much: recognised in 1929, it is a pure twentieth-century invention and shows the goddess Diana, copied from a small bronze statue found at Concordia Sagittaria in 1926 — a divinity venerated in pre-Christian Veneto as protectress of woods, mountains and waters, which at least agrees with this country. These are the hills of the prosecco of Conegliano-Valdobbiadene, and here stand six of the sixteen monumental trees of the whole province: five beeches and a lime.