Malo

The village gave its name to a book through a pun. Luigi Meneghello, born here, called his most important work Libera nos a Malo, which in the Latin Our Father means «deliver us from evil» and at the same time «deliver us from Malo». Published in 1963, the book has no real plot: it moves by what Meneghello called «parole-amo», hook-words, words able to drag a string of images and memories along behind them, and it tells the customs, the figures and the life of the village and of the Vicenza countryside between the nineteen-thirties and the nineteen-sixties.

Before that Malo had had some disreputable masters. In 1230 Frederick II made a certain Savino count of Malo, who judging by the documents was a usurer: he had lent at interest to a Milanese nobleman and, in 1225, to the countess mother of the Maltraversi counts. His deputy too, Bartolomeo Pagani, lent at usury, and in that same year he bought from the comune of Malo — in debt precisely because of those loans — property at Leguzzano and up in the hills. Earlier still, in 1184, the bishop of Vicenza Giovanni de Surdis Cacciafronte had been killed by an assassin from Malo named Pietro, and in 1200 it was the turn of his successor Pistore. Of the castle the bishop had built in 910 against the Hungarians, nothing more is said after 1311.