Marano di Valpolicella

There is a hill here that nobody has ever left empty: Monte Castelon. On the top there was first a Bronze Age castelliere, that is a fortified hilltop settlement, put there because from up there you can watch all the valleys; then the Romans built a temple to Minerva, of which the remains are still there; then, around the tenth century, the people raised a castle, which Federico della Scala had rebuilt at the beginning of the fourteenth century. When Federico had to go into exile the castle fell into disgrace with him and was destroyed, probably in 1325. The same thing happened on a small scale at Valgatara: in the church of San Marco al Pozzo, among the stones of the building, there is one bearing a first-century inscription about the cult of Jupiter.

The oldest name of the town is Marianum, which in late Latin means land belonging to a Marius; and local tradition decided that this Marius was Gaius Marius himself, who would have had a castle built at the Castelon precisely to defend against the Cimbri. The rest of the name is recent: after annexation to the Kingdom of Italy a royal decree added «di Valpolicella» so as not to confuse this Marano with all the others in the peninsula. Before the Romans arrived, in the second century before Christ, the valley belonged to the Arusnates. In the twelfth century Marano and Valgatara appear as rural comuni with an uncommon independence from any ecclesiastical body, and from 1183 they submitted to Verona, but peacefully; under the Venetians the town entered the Vicariate of the Valpolicella, which allowed it a statute of its own. Today the valley climbs from the plain to the Lessini among vines and olives, and it makes Valpolicella.