The Antonine Itinerary calls this place ad aureos montes, and that is where the name comes from: Montebello means beautiful mountain, not mountain of war as some have claimed, if only because it is unclear which war that would be. From 148 before Christ the via Postumia ran through here, and there was a mutatio, a station for resting and changing horses, in the locality still called Mason, from mansio. The building is still standing, and it had a second life: from 1189 it is recorded as belonging to the Knights of the Temple, and it is the only Templar preceptory in the Vicenza area, a house that supported pilgrims bound for the Holy Land. Its vaulted cellars survive, the stone buttresses, the arch giving onto the courtyard, the well-head and a keystone carved with the Templar cross. And there survives the inventory the Inquisition made of it in 1310, three years after the suppression of the Order.
On the eighth of April 1848, between Montebello and Sorio, two thousand two hundred young Italian volunteers, many of them students of the university of Padua, badly armed and barely organised, found themselves facing three thousand Austrian soldiers. The Austrians won, being real soldiers: fifty volunteers were left on the field and the wounded were very many, and a spire at Sorio remembers them. In that fight the old Templar house was damaged too. The town took the specification Vicentino in 1866, when the Veneto joined Italy and it had to be told apart from places of the same name; and from here came general Giuseppe Vaccari, who would lead the resistance on the Piave.
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📅 Every year, on 24 June; the linden-wood Madonna is carried in procession every 5 years
Montebello Vicentino celebrates Saint John on 24 June. The town also keeps a statue of the Madonna and Child, carved entirely from linden wood, carried in procession every five years since 1793.
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.
