Belfiore

This town used to be called Porcile, pigsty, and it took three centuries to get rid of the name. The name came from the road: the imperial way that passed through was the Berengaria, built in the tenth century by king Berengar I, but people called it the Porcilana because it crossed the comune of Porcile. On 13 January 1547 the well-off families of the place petitioned the Council of Twelve of Verona to change the name to Belfior, which was the name of one of the contrade; the request was granted only halfway, because beside Belfior the attestation «di Porcile» had to remain. It took Napoleon's administrative reform, which cut the country into departments, for the town to become Belfiore d'Adige and shed Porcile; and the present name has been official only since the royal decree of 11 August 1867, signed by Victor Emmanuel II after the resolution of the town council of Belfiore di Porcile.

Palazzo Moneta, built in 1563 and praised by Giorgio Vasari, has a staircase that was not made for people: it is helicoidal, of bricks laid on edge and in herringbone, and they call it the mule staircase, because it served to take the mules up to the granaries with the fruits of the fields. Outside the built-up area, in the middle of the fields, stands the sanctuary of the Madonna della Strà, which goes back to 1143, and scattered wayside shrines to the Virgin or to lesser saints. Until the middle of the twentieth century a great part of the comune was taken up by the marsh of the Zerpa, between the Adige and the Alpone, later drained; today those fields make apples, and the Decio apple of Belfiore is a Slow Food presidium with its own feast on the first Sunday of October.