Dolcè

Dolcè is a comune shaped like a strip: it stretches some twenty kilometres along the Adige, from the border with Trentino to the point where the river comes out into the upper plain, and it is the first Verona comune on the left bank. Such a shape is no whim of geography, it is the result of a frontier: at Ossenigo, until 1915, ran the border with the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Halfway along is the chiusa di Ceraino, where for a few hundred metres the river squeezes into a gorge that once could be passed only by water, and there, in the mid-nineteenth century, the Austrians placed the fort of the Chiusa and, on the slope of Monte Pastello, Fort Ceraino. They are still there, abandoned. In the Second World War Ceraino and Volargne were almost levelled by the explosion of a German train loaded with ammunition, hit by two American fighter-bombers: the first struck the train, the second was caught in the blast and crashed.

The name, by contrast, speaks of fruit: it comes from Dulcetum, that is a wood of sweet fruit trees, and appears from the twelfth century as Dulcei, Dolcei and Dolcedo. The coat of arms, which the comune uses although no decree of grant is on record, is a small inventory: a golden beehive with four bees, a silver demi-flight, a pear with two leaves and a black bear standing on the green. The oldest thing in the territory is the Soman rock shelter, frequented from the Epigravettian to the Mesolithic, where the remains of a woman who lived around 5000 before Christ were found. The most tenacious, on the other hand, is a vine: the Enantio, a very ancient local variety, is among the few that escaped phylloxera more than a hundred years ago, and here there are stocks more than a hundred years old.