Monticello Conte Otto

The name of this comune is a lord's: count Ottone Bonamici, who obtained the place in fief from the bishop of Vicenza. Monticello is named in 1118 and, when it became a comune, it was called Monticellum Domini Octonis, that is the little mount — that rise in the ground still noticeable north of the parish nursery school — of lord Otto. The other two names are literal too: Cavazzale means head, or end, because there the wood of the city of Vicenza came to an end; Vigardolo comes from the Latin vicus, village. In the early Middle Ages the territory was almost all wood, marsh and standing water, also because of the floods of the Astico; after the river was diverted eastwards, in the twelfth century the clearing and the reclamation began, and the first inhabitants organised themselves into three small rural communities, each with a dean, two governors and some councillors.

In 1353, under the Scaliger lordship, Monticello obtained important privileges from the Comune of Vicenza, and paid for them in water: it had to carry at its own expense the water of the roggia Tribolo into the city ditches, at Borgo Scroffa, as far as the gate of Santa Lucia. That flow seems to have been maintained until the eighteenth century, and the canal was probably buried during the works for the great cemetery. At Vigardolo, in 1542, Andrea Palladio designed villa Valmarana Bressan, one of his first independent works: it probably stands where the castle stood that the Confinii colturarum of 1277 still give as working and that in 1435 was already recorded as castrum antiquum, that is a ruin — and the villa keeps cellars of clearly medieval origin. In 1807 the French government suppressed the comuni of Vigardolo and Cavazzale and out of the three made the present comune. At Cavazzale, finally, stands villa Zanella, willed and built by the poet Giacomo Zanella, who lived there from 1880 until his death in 1888: a few steps away runs the Astichello, to which he devoted a collection of poems.