Montecchia di Crosara

Montecchia di Crosara has 4,462 inhabitants in the Val d'Alpone, in the eastern Lessini mountains, and lives on two crops that share the hills between them: twenty thousand quintals of cherries and two hundred thousand hectolitres of wine a year. On Monte Duello, which marks the boundary with Roncà, there is instead an Eocene fossil bed: out of it have come a prehistoric crocodile and the most complete specimen known of Prototherium, an ancestor of the sea cows, from when there was sea here.

The most important story, though, is eighty years old. During the war there was a labour camp at Montecchia for Allied prisoners, who dug in the basalt quarry; it depended on the camp at Bussolengo and lasted until 8 September 1943. On that day the prisoners all escaped, and most of them found shelter in the houses of local people, who hid them. A year later, on the third of September 1944, came the reprisal: the village was sacked and set on fire, and according to the reports of the time thirty-four buildings burned, housing fifty-three families. Five people died in the fire, among them two little girls, Bruna and Rosetta Dal Cero, nine and three years old. Every so often, even now, one of those prisoners comes back to Montecchia to greet the families who had hidden him.