Creazzo

Around the year one thousand the threat of the Hungarians and the constant floods pushed the people of the plain up onto the hills, where the «old village» grew around the castle of the bishop of Vicenza. The old pieve, down along the Retrone, was dedicated to San Cipriano; the new church, built up here around 990, was dedicated instead to Sant'Ulderico — that is, to Ulrich, bishop of Augsburg, who in 955 had defeated the Hungarians themselves. It is a choice that says everything about that moment. The church, enlarged in the fifteenth century and rebuilt in the seventeenth and nineteenth, keeps an altarpiece painted in his honour in the last decade of the sixteenth century, probably by Francesco and Girolamo Da Ponte.

The name, on the other hand, speaks of the soil: Credacium is attested as early as the fifth or sixth century, Credacio in a document of 1068, and it comes from creta, cretaceum, that is clayey ground — the same word that in the Trentino gives credazo. The castle had a troubled life: in 1130 it was destroyed by the bishop of Vicenza himself, Enrico, at war with the nobles of his own city; quickly rebuilt, it was set on fire along with the village in 1313, during one of the endless wars between the Carraresi and the Scaligeri, and in 1510 the place was sacked by imperial troops. Across the plain runs the Retrone, the ancient Edronis already mentioned by Strabo and by Pliny the Elder; the hills give figs at the end of summer — there were so many fig trees that one road is called Figarolo — and in winter the broccolo fiolaro, which has its own festival in January.