Caldogno

This village ought to have been called Sesto. In Roman times it was the village six miles from Vicenza, on the lower decumanus of the centuriated land, and it was the district ad sextum lapidem: the name has survived, but only as an address, the Contrà del Sesto in via Roma. Elsewhere that position gave the comune its name — Sesto San Giovanni, Quarto d'Altino — here it did not, and scholars have been quarrelling about it for a century. Some derive it from Carturnium; some from Calidarium, that is from hot baths, a weak hypothesis because the springs of Caldogno fed the Roman aqueduct of Vicenza and gave cold water; some from a word supposed to mean «valley area», and Caldogno lies on a plain.

The two finest explanations are Lombard: either from the Germanic «Kalt», precisely because the water of the springs came out clear and very cold, or from aldiones, the semi-free peasants of the Lombard age — pronounced with a slight aspiration it becomes Haldiones, and by metathesis Caldonius: the village of the semi-free peasants, as distinct from the serfs of the soil. Here, on 18 February 1967, Roberto Baggio was born, the sixth of eight children; his father, who was keen on football and on cycling, named him Roberto in honour of Boninsegna. Ballon d'Or in 1993, in 1994 he carried Italy to the final with five decisive goals and then missed his own penalty.