The town is named after a stump. The words di Zocco come from the Venetian soco, a tree trunk: tradition says it was the one beside which the yearly horse fair was held, or the one outside the posting station where pack animals were tied up. The fair of the Soco turns up in a Venetian document in 1555, and it has hardly ever missed a year since: on 12 September 1796 a French army plundered it, and in 1865 and 1867 it was called off on health grounds, with the prefect giving notice that anyone coming to trade would be turned away. It was in 1867 that the comune officially took the name Grisignano di Zocco.
Francesco Secondo Beggiato, a nineteenth-century doctor and botanist, came from here, and a genus of bacteria that lives in sulphurous water is named after him: Beggiatoa. The agrarian inquiry of 1882 described another Grisignano: the peasants bore their privations with a fair degree of patience, and children of eight and nine were sent out to work in the rice fields. In a single year, from a village of fewer than two thousand people, 102 left for Brazil, for São Paulo. Today the town is home to Prema, the racing team founded in 1983 that competes in Formula 2 and Formula 3.
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📅 Every year, on 25 March; the Fiera del Soco documented since 1555
Grisignano di Zocco celebrates Santa Maria Annunziata on 25 March. Its Fiera del Soco fair is documented as early as 1555.
Stockfish, milk, oil and anchovies, cooked for hours over the lowest heat: baccalà alla vicentina arrived from Norway with a shipwreck in 1432.
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The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Grisignano di Zocco, but an easy day trip away.
