Zevio

The name of Zevio is said to come from a defeated people. After the Lombard king Alboin had finally beaten the Gepids in 567, they were allowed to settle here, and the area came to be called the land of the Gepids, fines Gepidana: from Jébetum, or Gébetum, by way of Gébeto and Zéveo, one arrives at Zevio. The oldest known record is of 846, in the will of one Engelberto da Erbé, who owned a farmstead «in loco et fundo Gebitus». Another theory, put forward in the nineteenth century by monsignor Luigi Gaiter, derived the name from the Latin devius, «village off the road», because the settlement lies a short way from the via Postumia; but the documents do not support it.

The small fort that defended Verona on this side stood where villa Sagramoso is today, which in the village they still call «the castle»: on its walls one can read the writing left by the French soldiers billeted there, and the archpriest of the time, don Francesco Fresco, kept a diary of the Napoleonic battles of Caldiero and of what the French rule brought with it. Also at Zevio, in the Scaliger age, Saint Toscana was born. Between 1898 and 1925 the steam tramway to Albaredo and Coriano passed through here, which at the start of the century was at the centre of an experiment in integrated transport: it was to be linked to a large river port on the Adige.