Oppeano

From the necropolises around this village came a helmet that carries its name. The helmet of Oppeano, of bronze, belongs to the second period of the Atestine civilisation and is a particularly rare piece: it is conical in shape and decorated with a series of horses and with a strange winged quadruped that has the head and forelegs of a man. The original is kept at the National Archaeological Museum of Florence, but a faithful copy can be seen in the reception hall of the town hall and another at the archaeological museum of Verona; together with the helmet a bronze belt was also found. The area was inhabited from very far back: near the river there are remains of pile dwellings of the Bronze Age, and the finding of vases closed with lids containing ash and metal objects suggests several necropolises. Then come the documents: in 1145 pope Eugene III writes of the plebem Opedani cum capellis et decimis, the church became a pieve and a parish with an archpriest in 1460, and the present building is of 1841, raised over a first church of the eleventh century.

The twentieth century left here two very different stories of war. During the First World War the frazione of Ca' degli Oppi housed an airfield, seat of the eleventh group of the air corps of the Royal Army. During the Second, inside a farm courtyard of the frazione of Mazzantica, there was a labour camp for Allied prisoners, run by the Royal Army until September 1943; after the armistice most of the prisoners escaped, but many others found hospitality with the peasant families and stayed hidden until the end. The New Zealand scholar Susan Jacobs, who works on prisoners of war, has spoken for these cases of a «peasant solidarity» that could hardly have shown itself with the same force elsewhere: it is one of the finest pages of the unarmed resistance. Today Oppeano, a city since 2011, lies in the area of the Vialone Nano rice of Verona and of classic furniture; and in the frazione of Vallese, in 1986, the Calzedonia company was founded.