Cogollo del Cengio

On the thirty-first of July 1202, in the little church of Sant'Agata at Cogollo, the boundaries on the right bank of the Astico were laid down and some agreements on rights of pasture and of firewood were approved: that meeting sanctioned the birth of the comuni of Arsiero, Velo and Cogollo, and later, by dividing Arsiero's territory further, of Posina and Tonezza as well. Two years later, on the thirtieth of September 1204, another was held nearby, in the meadow called Prà della Warda, to fix the boundaries on the left bank of the stream: present were Cogollo, Caltrano, Chiuppano and the Seven Comuni of the plateau. Five comuni born from an agreement about pastures and firewood, inside a church and in the middle of a field. And the name of that field is itself a document: Warda, later Varda, comes from the Germanic Ward, a place of guard.

The village's name may come from the Latin cucullus, the hooded cloak the shepherds used, or from the medieval Latin cubulum, that is shelter, den, cave — and the second reading finds support in the municipal arms, which seem to show exactly a rocky shelter, or the heaps of stones with which farmers marked the boundaries of their fields. Of the fortifications, on the other hand, nothing is left. Between 917 and 921 the emperor Berengar gave all this territory to the bishop of Padua with the obligation to build castles and defensive works against the Hungarian raids; the castle of Cogollo belonged to the bishops of Vicenza and is named in imperial diplomas from 1000 to 1210, but by the second half of the thirteenth century it had already vanished: in an investiture of 1282 the bishop grants a piece of land «where the castle formerly stood». The great watchtower south of the village lasted instead until the nineteenth century, and when Francesco Caldogno asked the doge to hold it in fief the request was not granted, because Cogollo, Caltrano and Piovene firmly opposed it.