Nogarole Rocca

The excavations carried out between 2017 and 2019 brought to light a necropolis that is the only one in northern Italy for which a continuity of use can be supposed between the Bell Beaker age and the Bronze Age: people went on burying their dead in the same place across the passage from one era to the other. Written history begins in 933, when under the reign of Hugh of Provence the Nogarola arrived from France and built the castle to which everything else is tied. From the early fourteenth century the fief belonged to the Dal Verme, condottieri, until in 1437 Venice confiscated all their Venetian holdings for their final alliance with Milan. Then came the strangest sale: in the middle of the sixteenth century the Serenissima auctioned the castle at Rialto for five hundred and twenty ducats, with the obligation on the buyer to lower it, to strip it of every look of a fortress, to level the earthworks and fill in the ditches.

Two years later the stronghold passed to the Bevilacqua Lazise, who took from it the title of counts and held it until 1878, and whose eagle is still carved in the inner arch; inside the castle there is a small church dedicated to San Carlo Borromeo. A promise that was not kept is bound up with the property too: in 1973 the last owner left the whole complex by will to the provincial administration of Verona, so that it should be made into a hospital for children with motor disabilities, and the province did not do it. A few small houses for the care of those same young people were built only some forty years later, and only because a committee of their parents and relatives asked for them. The rest of the territory is cultivated plain: Nogarole Rocca falls within the production area of Nano Vialone Veronese rice, irrigated with spring water.