Trevenzuolo

The traditional feast of Trevenzuolo falls on the first Sunday of September and everybody calls it the sagra di San Luigi, but it has nothing to do with San Luigi. The feast is old, and it was instituted to remember the consecration of the parish church, which took place on the third of September 1486 at the hands of the archbishop of Durazzo; only in the last century was it paired, as happened in many parishes, with the patron saint of the young. And the church consecrated that day is no longer there: the present Santa Maria Maddalena was built in the eighteen hundreds in place of the fifteenth-century pieve. So the village goes on keeping the anniversary of the blessing of a building it has demolished, under the name of a saint who has nothing to do with the day. The real patronal feast, that of Santa Maria Maddalena, is on the twenty-second of July.

People have lived here a long time, because there is water: traces of settlement go back to the Bronze Age, and out of the Roman village came epigraphs, a finely worked gem, the remains of several tile workshops and a small bronze — the figure of a lady, found here in the eighteen hundreds, which is now in the British Museum in London. The name too is Roman: it comes from the Latin personal name Trebentius, or Terventius. In the Middle Ages the story of the place is the story of two monasteries, San Zeno and San Giorgio in Braida, which held privileges and feudal investitures here; from the twelve hundreds the Scaligeri took the convent's place, and at the beginning of the fifteenth century, with the Scaligeri gone, there came the short Visconti rule, the Da Carrara, the Dal Verme and at last Venice — and from then on Trevenzuolo went wherever Verona went. Today its fields grow cereals, radicchio, strawberries and melons, on family farms, and the territory lies inside the area where Riso Nano Vialone Veronese is grown, on the plain, watered from the risorgive.