Chiuppano

On the arms granted by royal decree of 16 February 1931 there is a dove in flight pecking the top of a green mountain, and the dove is there, the papers say, as a symbol of peace and of the collaborative coexistence of the inhabitants. It raises a smile, because the documented history of Chiuppano is made mostly of quarrels, and quarrels over the mountains at that: for centuries it fought with Caltrano, the village on the other bank of the Astico, over the division of the mountains Paù, Zovo, Becco, Beccaria and Anguon; nor was coexistence easy with the other neighbour, Carrè. Quite the contrary: in the Napoleonic age Chiuppano and Carrè were reduced to hamlets of Piovene, and when autonomy returned in 1814 it was to the advantage of Carrè, to which Chiuppano stayed tied until March 1911. A comune that obtained the right to stand on its own a little more than a century ago, and twenty years later gave itself a dove on its shield.

The name comes from a fundus Cleppianus, a Roman estate, and Roman is the role of the place: here people crossed the Astico to climb towards the plateau, on wooden footbridges rebuilt over the centuries where the masonry bridge now stands. In 917 the emperor Berengar donated the whole territory between Astico and Brenta to Sibicone, bishop of Padua, with the obligation to build castles against the Hungarian raids; the village appears in documents in 975 and in 983, and by the beginning of the thirteenth century it is already an autonomous comune headed by a dean. Of the castle on the hill not a stone remains, only the name: that hill is still called the Castle. Then came industry — in 1890 the first stone of the Lanificio Rossi, in 1907 the electric light offered by Gaetano Rossi, the following year the train to Asiago — and immediately after came the war, which here was lived through twice as refugees: evacuated under the Strafexpedition, back on the first of July, gone again in November 1917 after Caporetto. On the fortified Bregonze there were more than twenty-five thousand British soldiers. When the war ended the village raised an arch at the cemetery entrance for its thirty-two fallen.