Montecchio Precalcino has 4,988 inhabitants around the Monte de Montécio, a low hill made of black basalt: it is a Hawaiian-type lava flow that came out of a fracture in the crust, and the last effusions go back some fifteen million years, when there was a coral reef here. The name appears in the thirteenth century as Monticulus Precalcini: the little mount, and then the lime — the lime drawn from the gravels carried down by the Astico. The chimneys of the kilns still stand beside the bridge at Passo di Riva.
The hamlets, too, name the trade: Levà comes from levata, the rising road, and Preara from priara, the stone quarry on the Astico. That torrent, when it flooded, reached Vicenza and drowned its lower town: to stop it the Romans built a murazzo between Sarcedo and the montecchio, which still surfaces at Preara. A thousand years later the Venetians raised another, between 1507 and 1532, and that one can still be seen, imposing, east of the hill.
No events match these filters.
📅 Every year, in mid-June; Levà brings the Speo dei Morti run by the Quail Brotherhood
Montecchio Precalcino celebrates Saints Vitus and Modestus with the Sagra dei Santi Patroni in mid-June. In the hamlet of Levà, the Quail Brotherhood organizes the Sagra dello Spiedo in September and the Speo dei Morti in late October.
Stockfish, milk, oil and anchovies, cooked for hours over the lowest heat: baccalà alla vicentina arrived from Norway with a shipwreck in 1432.
Read more →Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Montecchio Precalcino, but an easy day trip away.
