Gallio

The name looks German and is not. The Cimbrian form Ghel, or Ghelle, is for nearly all scholars only an adaptation: Dante Olivieri, starting from the Galedum attested in 1261, takes it from the Latin Galatus, a personal name, and Giovan Battista Pellegrini and Maria Hornung conclude much the same, without excluding the personal name Gallicus. The prettier hypothesis, the one tying the village to German gelb or Cimbrian ghel, «yellow», for the colour of the clays around the Ghelpach torrent, Pellegrini rejects with a simple argument: in Cimbrian the stream's name means «brook of Gallio», not «yellow brook». It is the village that gave its name to the water, not the other way round. Other explanations bring in a Germanic idol worshipped on the hill of the Ekele, where the parish church was later built, or the Lombard gahagium, the fenced ground. The first notice of the territory is of 983, and the terra que vocatur Galade appears in 1162.

Gallio, the highest comune of the province of Vicenza at 1093 metres, worked for centuries with water. In the Val Frenzela the workshops of the Covola are documented from the sixteenth century: the spring drove them, and the old land registers say what was done there. The pila da scorza, to draw tannin from fir bark for tanning hides; the grain mill and the barley huller; the fulling mill, where wool and felt were beaten until they turned soft. Then the war came. In 1916, with the Südtiroloffensive, the Austro-Hungarians broke through on the Trentino front, the population was evacuated and the village sacked; after the taking of Asiago a bombardment razed it almost to the ground, and part of the workshops was destroyed. In 1917 the Italian army built there, beside the spring, a hydroelectric station and a pumping plant to carry water up to monte Zebio. The path that runs along the buildings is called today the path of the mills.