Malcesine

The name of Malcesine can be watched as it changes. It appears for the first time on the ninth of September 844, as Manessicelles, in the will of archdeacon Pacifico; then it becomes Manascicines in 932, Malesicine in 1023, Malasilice in 1225, Malsesene still in 1611. What it meant remains uncertain: the most widely followed hypothesis is mala silex, the bad or hostile stone, and one glance at the mountains plunging into the lake explains why; others take it instead for a bad paved road of Roman date.

The municipality climbs from the lake, at eighty-nine metres, to the crest of Monte Baldo, above two thousand two hundred, and touches two other regions; in the hamlet of Cassone runs the Aril, about a hundred and seventy-five metres long, one of the shortest rivers in the world. The longest-lasting thing here, though, cannot be seen: the Roman vicus never quite died. In 1023 the documents speak of the vico Malesisine, in 1193 there is a magister Campi, and in 1611 the communal assemblies are still called vicinie. The name of the assembly outlived by more than a thousand years the empire that invented it.