Volpago del Montello

The name appears for the first time in 1297, in a mention of the church: Plebes S. Marie de Bolpago. Popular etymology makes it the village of the foxes, but the likelier explanation is a prediale, that is the memory of a Roman landowner called Vulpius; a third hypothesis starts from the old form Bolpagus and finds in it the root bol-, of late-barbarian origin, meaning «red earth», plus the suffix -pagus, which in Latin means a village or a small district: «the village of the red earth», which the geology of the place confirms. The «del Montello» was added by royal decree on 24 May 1925, and refers to the events of the First World War. Under Venice, on the other hand, the Montello that rises above the village was forbidden ground: its wood served the Arsenal alone.

In 1870 Volpago was one of the first places in the area to be industrialised, thanks to the Gobbato family, who put a silk mill and a silkworm plant beside their villas and gave work to hundreds of people, from the neighbouring villages too; it was not enough to stop the widespread poverty, and emigration towards South America went on. During the Great War the village found itself in the front line, with the fighting raging above all along the northern slope of the Montello. On 24 July 1930 a tornado brought death and destruction and smashed the church of Selva, which was one of the richest in works of art in the whole diocese of Treviso: in the new church, designed by Fausto Scudo, six large canvases with stories of Moses by Giannantonio Guardi, Francesco Guardi and Francesco Fontebasso have recently been put back.