Gambellara

The coat of arms of Gambellara is halved, and the two halves do not resemble each other at all. Above, on a red field, is a golden bunch of grapes with green stem and leaves. Below, on a blue field, is the obelisk raised in memory of the battle of Sorio, fought on the eighth of April 1848 between the Austrian army and the free corps of the Republic of San Marco: the obelisk is topped by a four-pointed star and rests on the central one of three hills. Wine and war, one above the other. The wine is what has made the town known beyond its borders: the recioto di Gambellara and the Vin Santo, drawn from Garganega grapes trained on the Veronese pergola on terraced slopes. One of the hamlets, for its part, is called Torri di Confine, the border towers, and says by itself where the boundary ran.

Beneath the vineyards, though, lies something older than all the rest. The territory keeps columnar basalts, volcanic rocks solidified into hexagonal prisms formed about fifty million years ago: a rare geological heritage. Of the original basalt front, however, only a short stretch remains today, because after the Second World War quarrying carried nearly all of it away. The rest of the town's chronicle is made of small and durable things: in 1913 a small hoard of fifty-five silver coins of the seventeenth century was found; the feast of the grape and the recioto, on the fourth Sunday of September, has reached its ninety-second edition; and at Epiphany they light the Bujelo, the burning of the befana.