Erbezzo

Erbezzo is the highest comune in the province of Verona, at 1118 metres on the upper Valpantena, and the westernmost of the old Thirteen Communities. Its name comes from erbezare, to turn green like grass, and its territory lies almost entirely inside the Lessinia park, from the seven hundred metres of the valley floor up to the Castelberto refuge. Here is the documented reason for the whole Cimbrian history of these mountains: by an agreement of 1287 the bishop of Verona, Bartolomeo della Scala, called woodcutters from Bavaria — the tzimberer — offering them a permanent house in exchange for clearing an assigned share of the forest. The settlements they founded became the Thirteen Communities.

Of those beech woods a few monumental trees survive: four beeches more than a century old and a sycamore maple, twenty to thirty metres tall, the last pieces of the forest that let the Cimbri settle here. Today the economy is stock-raising and mountain milk: Monte Veronese cheese has its own festival, at which the Mastro Casar is crowned — the cheesemaker who has made the best cheese of the year — and there is even a saint for it, Saint Mammes, patron of milk and dairy workers because of the miracle by which he is said to have suckled an abandoned child. The parish church dates from 1720 and holds a painting by Francesco Torbido; the herdsmen's gnocchi here are made without potatoes: flour, water, plenty of cheese and melted butter.