Cerro Veronese

There is a myth to take apart here, and the source takes it apart itself. The story goes that the high Lessinia was first colonised by German-speaking people, and the document exists: on 5 February 1287 bishop Bartolomeo della Scala, with the assent of Alberto della Scala, captain of Verona, allowed a number of settlers probably Bavarian to establish themselves at Roverè and in the nearby lands, exempting them from tolls and from military obligations in time of peace. But those woods had interested the bishops and lords of Verona long before: in 969 Otto I left some inhabitants of the Valpantena the use of the Selva Frizzolana, already called of the arimanni, the waldemanni, that is the woodcutters, and in 1218 the bishop regulated the felling. The names say the contrary too: Cerro, Roverè, Bosco, Velo are Roman or Venetian, and only the smaller contrade are called Vesterle or Laito.

And the ground goes back further still. At the Còale del Mondo, in the Vajo de la Busa, between 1947 and 1953 the scholars of the Natural History Museum of Verona dug through an Eneolithic layer and under it older ones, down to one of the upper Palaeolithic: blades, scrapers, burins, arrow and javelin points. The village is called Veronese so as not to be confused with the other Cerri of Italy, those on the Lambro, on the Volturno, on the Tanaro; its older name, the Cimbrian Alferìa, was dropped in the sixteenth century but stayed on the main square, which is still Piazza Alferia. At the end of the nineteenth century Sormani-Moretti described it as two hundred houses on an open mountain, the schools around the church and a town hall «cramped but sufficient all the same». Then, from 1928 to 1947, Cerro was not a comune at all: it went into Grezzana, and in those years the aqueduct arrived from the Dosso del Martin. It became a comune again in 1948.