Bressanvido

On the penultimate weekend of September about two hundred and fifty cattle come down from the mountain to the plain, and the village makes a feast of it. The herd sets off on Saturday from a malga on the Marcesina, at Enego, on the plateau of the Seven Comuni; it passes Gallio and halts in the evening at Conco. On Sunday morning it takes up the descent again, crosses Marostica, Nove and a hamlet of Pozzoleone, and stops at Poianella, where the oldest cows are decked out. Then the herd parades through the streets of Bressanvido. It is not a re-enactment: it is the transhumance, done on foot as it has always been done. The municipal coat of arms, for that matter, is split in half between history and economy, and on the economy side, beneath an ear of wheat and a cob of maize, there is a golden ox standing in a meadow.

The name Bressanvido appears for the first time in a document of 983, drawn up at the order of bishop Rodolfo of Vicenza, who gave an important holding — with the chapels that depended on it — to the Benedictine monks of the abbey of Santi Felice e Fortunato: in braydo S. Viti curtes quator cum plebe et capellis. Oddly, the pieve appears in that list too; but a pieve carried an ecclesiastical jurisdiction that normally belonged to the bishop, and out of that single line came, in the following centuries, the disputes between the abbey and the diocese. The monks stayed until 1806, when the requisition of church property ordered by Napoleon began, and the red cross on the arms stands for them. Braido, meanwhile, means a rural holding; the hamlet of Poianella, which has more inhabitants than the capoluogo, is first recorded in 1261, and its name is said to come from a Slavic word meaning marshy meadow — which fits, because here the water table lies a few centimetres under the surface and the springs are numerous enough to have a committee of their own. In June 1918, finally, an air section moved into Poianella, and other units followed it until the end of the war.