Pramaggiore

Pramaggiore has 4,640 inhabitants in eastern Veneto, towards the Friulian border. The town appears for the first time in a document of 1225, when it belonged to the patriarchal state of Aquileia, but its hamlets are older than it is: Blessaglia is named as early as the ninth century, and Salvarolo grew up around a castle built at the end of the tenth by the lords of that name. That castle later passed to the Altan, who put it back in order and finally abandoned it: nothing of it is left today. The comune as we know it was created in 1806, and in 1838 the Austrians moved it from the province of Friuli to that of Venice. In the Second World War, at Blessaglia, an SS unit hanged eight partisans of the Ippolito Nievo brigade.

The name of Pramaggiore, though, is read today above all on bottles. In 1972 the "Pramaggiore" denomination was created for the merlot and cabernet produced in these parts; the year before another had been created, "Lison", for the tocai of a hamlet of Portogruaro. In 1985 it was the producers themselves who asked to merge them, and since then the wine of this countryside has been called Lison-Pramaggiore: two villages in a single denomination. The consortium that protects it has its operational seat here.