Vigasio

Here the composer Italo Montemezzi was born and here he died: Vigasio, 4 August 1875 — Vigasio, 15 May 1952. A learned musician, he fused the Italian melody of the verismo school with the harmonic and orchestral innovations of Wagner and, to a lesser degree, of Debussy and Strauss. The piece with which he graduated, a cantata on the text of the Song of Songs, was later performed under the direction of Arturo Toscanini; and in January 1914 it was again Toscanini who conducted at the Metropolitan of New York his most famous work, L'amore dei tre re, on a text by Sem Benelli, which from there passed to Boston, London and Paris. His first opera, Bianca, of 1901, remained unpublished for more than one hundred and twenty years: rediscovered and transcribed thanks to a research project involving the conservatory of Padua, it had its first performance ever on 8 May 2026, at the Teatro Sociale of Rovigo.

The village, before all this, was a junction of roads and a marsh. Vigasio stood on the Roman road that joined Mantua to Verona, and in the area Celtic weapons and tools have been found, in particular a sword and a series of tombs; in the first centuries after Christ, however, the ground was mostly waterlogged, and only the Benedictine monks managed to complete the reclamation. Where the marshes had been, the rice fields came. The first certain news is of 1014, when the emperor Henry II established that the territory should belong to the abbey of San Zeno of Verona; the name, instead, probably derives from vicus Atii, the settlement of the Atii. Today the comune lies inside the area of the Vialone Nano rice of Verona, irrigated with spring water, and every year, for three weeks from the middle of October, it holds a Fair of Polenta where maize polenta is served in more than a hundred different dishes.