Bolzano Vicentino

The name comes from a Latin family name, Baudius or Bautius, exactly like the other Bolzanos of Italy: the documents give it as Bauzano in 1284 and Bulzano in 1324. But this village of the Vicenza plain also had a German name and a Cimbrian one, Bozen and Póuzen, because from the Lombard invasions to the late Middle Ages the upper Vicentino was settled by peasants who came down from Bavaria and Swabia; and since there was more than one Bolzano, those forms too carried their own distinguishing tag, Póuzen in Visentain in Cimbrian and Bozen in Wiesenthein in German. The village was born through the Benedictines of Santi Felice e Fortunato of Vicenza: in 1134 the abbot invested a community of fratres et conversi, at the hospital of Lisiera, with a considerable stretch of land, and the locality still called Ospedaletto bears the name of that hospital.

A castle, here, there never really was: if there was one it must have been a slight thing, and it disappeared at the beginning of the twelfth century. The monument of the village is rather the pieve of Santa Maria, which in 1297 had six churches and chapels of the surrounding country under its jurisdiction. As for united Italy, which arrived in 1866, Bolzano made clear what it thought of the new centralism on 19 May 1875, when the municipal council refused mayor Giacomo Giaretta permission to buy a tricolour sash for public ceremonies. Nine votes to one.