Rivoli Veronese

Rivoli stands at the mouth of the Vallagarina, guarding the Chiusa: it is the point where the road coming down from the north enters the Italian plain, and through here has passed anyone wanting to go from Europe to the Mediterranean. Over the prehistoric tracks came the Roman via Claudia Augusta, and over that the imperial road of the middle ages. In 1154 Frederick Barbarossa crossed the Chiusa di Ceraino, a narrow, winding place made for ambushes; the year after, returning to Germany, he found a revolt waiting for him there, and it was a local man, Garzapano, who showed him a side path to take the enemy from behind. The emperor made him count of Rivoli and gave him the castle; the Veronese, who had had enough of that power, besieged the stronghold in 1164 and deposed him. In 1439, instead, the Venetians hauled their ships up the Adige against the current right past here, to get them into lake Garda.

The thing that made this name famous in the world, though, is a battle. On 14 and 15 January 1797 Napoleon Bonaparte defeated here the Austrians commanded by Alvinczy: in Paris the rue de Rivoli carries the name of those two days, and marshal Masséna received from it the title of duke of Rivoli. The position had always been held a formidable obstacle — Charles V and prince Eugene of Savoy preferred to go round it by mountain paths rather than attack it — and as late as 1848 Austrians and Piedmontese fought here. The oldest marks, though, are on the rock: on the slabs polished by the glacier, at Canale, there are some fifty engravings comparable to those of Val Camonica, with the difference that here the design stands in inverted relief, because the dissolved limestone has solidified again inside the groove. And in 1988, in an abandoned quarry, Mauro Cremaschi recognised a bone breccia of the Quaternary, with species of eastern Europe and a rodent, the Dinaromys allegranzii, the oldest form of its genus.