Montegalda

Five hypotheses are counted for the name of Montegalda, and none has won. Some read mons gaudium, hill of delight, for the pleasantness of the place; some mons Galba, from the name of a Servius Sulpicius Galba, perhaps the one who was praetor and Caesar's legate in Gaul; some monte Gualda, from the surname of a family that had property here; some mons wald, half Latin and half Germanic, where wald is the wood, and indeed until the eighteenth century forest covered the whole area. And there is the last, supported by the humanist Fedele Lampertico: mons warda, where warda is the Lombard watchtower, the same word that lies behind the name of Lake Garda, arrived here through the dissimilation of the r into an l. If that is so, the town and the lake are called the same thing, and it means only this: the hill from which one keeps watch.

Keeping watch, after all, was the trade of the place. Montegalda stands at the exact midpoint between Vicenza and Padua, and that made it a border for centuries: in 1176 Ottone da Montegalda sold his vast lands to the Vicentines, who wanted a bulwark towards Paduan territory, and in the same year the sources give the castle as built, although it is probably older, since the hill had belonged to the counts Maltraversi from the eleventh century. The castle was then at the centre of the rivalry between the two cities, and in 1256 Ezzelino III had it besieged and taken. From that condition of outpost a legend was born too: that all the firstborn males of the town were named knights, so that there should always be someone to defend it. And there remains the name of a Roman road linking the two cities, the via Pelosa, the hairy road, which according to one hypothesis is so called for the tufts of wool the passing flocks left on it.