Sant'Ambrogio di Valpolicella

The inhabitants of the ancient Valpolicella were called Arusnates, and we know it because at the beginning of the eighteenth century Scipione Maffei found two inscribed stones, one at Fumane and one at Sant'Ambrogio, and knew how to read them. Their religious centre was San Giorgio, where the pieve stands today: inside, several Roman altars have been reused as bases and capitals of the columns, and the inscriptions name deities that have nothing to do with the gods of Rome — Cuslanus, Ihamnagalle, Sqnnagalle, Lualda. In the right aisle, under a column, there is an altar dedicated to the Sun and the Moon, raised by the priest Quintus Sertorius Festus: it seems that only the Arusnates worshipped those two together.

On the high altar of the same pieve stand the small columns of a ciborium from the time of the Lombard king Liutprand, and the inscriptions give the names of those who made it: the king, bishop Domenico and three sculptors, Orso, Iuvintino and Iuviano. Stone, here, is the thread that holds everything together: the excavations east of the church found Iron Age houses roofed with slabs of the pinkish limestone quarried in the hill below, and to this day the town lives on marble and granite. In 1863 count Paolo Brenzoni founded a school of art for stonecutters, which is still teaching. On 6 November 1944 an Anglo-American bombing destroyed the centre of Sant'Ambrogio: the civilian victims were twenty-eight, and the street where the plaque stands bears the date of that day.