Badia Calavena

The village takes its name from an abbey, and the abbey takes its own from a stretch of valley. In 1040, under the jurisdiction of the bishop of Verona, a German called Walterio built a castle on the hill of San Pietro; it was destroyed almost at once, and on its ruins was built the monastery of the saints Peter, Vitus and Modestus, with German monks of the Benedictine order, like the abbey of San Zeno at Verona. In 1185 pope Lucius III, who then had the papal see at Verona, came to consecrate its church. Since it stood in the stretch of valley called Calavena, it was known as the Badia della Calavena, and from that the village below took its name. There were Germans here, in short, before the Cimbri — and when the Cimbri arrived the two did not get on. Carlo Cipolla counts Badia as the second Cimbrian settlement of the Lessinia after Roverè, in 1333, and describes it as numerous; and a deed of the tenth of January of that same year already records a dispute between the monastery and the inhabitants of Badia over pastures and land. They quarrelled again in the fifteen hundreds, when the badiesi tried to take advantage of the abbey's decline.

The village proper was born in the fourteen hundreds, and it grew exactly as the old abbey declined: before, the houses stood inside the monastery's perimeter, in the upper part, and the old documents record that in 1442 there were, outside it, an inn and a butcher's shop. That is where Badia begins. A new monastery was built by a young Veronese abbot, rich and noble, Maffeo Maffei, swallowing older buildings and taking the place of Monte San Pietro; it passed to one congregation and then to another, and today its remains are spoilt by partial abandonment and by the private dwellings that have got inside them, while the monastery's patrimony — precious furnishings and a rich archive — has been dispersed: a very small part is in the State Archive of Verona, the rest in private hands or destroyed. In the rooms beside the old church of Monte San Pietro there is now a museum dedicated to flint and firestone. The plague of 1630 reached here too, and at Sprea they still remember it in a ceremony for San Rocco; in 1797 Badia was made the chief town of the district of the Mountain, and the thirteen ancient Cimbrian comuni of the Veronese lost the strong autonomy they had had. Today the comune calls its whole territory the Peper Park, the park of clean and renewable energies — the name was chosen by the schoolchildren in a competition — and in 2008 the first large wind generator in the Veneto was installed here.