The name is documented as Vidore in 1167 and probably comes from the vine or from vitor, the basket-maker; the sources then list a series of folk etymologies which they declare groundless, from golden vines to a lieutenant of Alboin, from a saint whose body passed this way to the word for guide. What made the village, though, was the crossing: a road junction and a river port on the Piave, still in use in 1871, with the castle on the hill and the abbey below. That abbey, Santa Bona, was founded between 1107 and 1110 by one Giovanni Gravone da Vidor, to keep the relics of a saint he had brought back from the Holy Land during the First Crusade; Venice suppressed it in 1773.
In the thirteenth century a hospital of the Battuti confraternity was opened here for the wayfarers passing through. The First World War arrived along the same crossing: Vidor was the bridgehead by which the troops retreating from Caporetto crossed the Piave, and then the front stopped here and the village stayed occupied until the end. The abbey was almost destroyed; of the parish complex the only thing left nearly intact was the bell tower, probably because the enemy needed it as a landmark. On the hill where the castle stood, pulled down in 1510, there is now the monument and ossuary to the fallen, and the same place, still called Castello, holds the palio that re-enacts the assaults the fortress suffered.
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📅 Every year, on 19 March; the Palio di Vidor since 1996, on the second Sunday of September
Vidor celebrates Saint Joseph on 19 March. Since 1996, the Palio di Vidor has been raced, recalling the many assaults the fortress suffered in medieval times and beyond.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Vidor, but an easy day trip away.
