Monte di Malo

A hamlet of this comune, Priabona, has given its name to a piece of geological time: the Priabonian, the last age of the Eocene, whose rock formed here between thirty-eight and thirty-four million years ago. The stratotype is this one, and here too there is a palaeontological museum that houses its study centre. Under the same hills runs the Buso della Rana, a cave with more than thirty-five kilometres of explored galleries. Until 2011 it counted as one of the most extensive cavities in Italy with a single entrance; then the speleologists opened a passage through to a neighbouring cave, and it lost the record — gaining fifteen kilometres of new galleries.

Up here people spoke German. In 1322 the podestà of Vicenza, acting for Cangrande della Scala, granted the German-speaking people who lived beyond the Giara torrent wide autonomy and various privileges. In 1388 the people of the mountain and their priest asked the bishop, and then Rome, to be separated from the mother church of Malo, down on the plain, and to be governed as a parish of their own; the reasons they gave were three — that they spoke German, that the pieve was far off, and that the sacraments were reserved to its archpriest, so that many died without them. The civil separation took longer: in fact it had happened by 1456, the tax registers were divided in 1468, and the definitive act that makes Monte di Malo a comune apart from Malo is of 1496 — and it has been lost.