The name means a small mound of earth, from the Latin grumulus, and the Abbadesse, the abbesses, record who ran the place: the Benedictine nuns of the monastery of San Pietro in Vicenza. In 1004 bishop Liudigerio granted them the pieve of Grumolo with its tithes, the village beside it and the wood that belonged to it, and it is to the abbey that the reclamation of the land, the draining of the marshes and the canals are owed. Of the castle no document survives, and yet it certainly existed: it is listed among the bishop's castles that Otto III's diploma of the year one thousand exempted from the fodro tax. Tradition places it where the parish church now stands.
The nuns' jurisdiction lasted until 1797, when the Venetian Republic fell and the French arrived: nearly eight centuries. And what they left is not only the name, because it was they who brought rice to Grumolo, from the sixteenth century on: the local vialone nano has tiny grains and is a Slow Food presidium, and the September fair is the rice festival. At Vancimuglio stands Villa Chiericati, probably to a design by Palladio, and at Sarmego Villa Godi Piovene, built in 1597 to a design by Vincenzo Scamozzi, with a chapel everyone calls la Favallina, after the ditch in front of it.
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📅 Every year, on 15 August; the Rice Festival on the third weekend of September
Grumolo delle Abbadesse celebrates Our Lady of the Assumption on 15 August, in the church dedicated to her. The third weekend of September brings the Rice Festival, which reached its 37th edition in 2024.
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 Grumolo delle Abbadesse, but an easy day trip away.
