Montorso Vicentino

In the villa of the da Porto family, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, lived Luigi da Porto, a soldier and man of letters who had come back here after being wounded in the fighting with the Landsknechts. From these hills one can see, on the rise at Montecchio Maggiore, the two castles that tradition calls those of Romeo and Juliet; and it was precisely here, perhaps while looking at them, that da Porto wrote the Historia novellamente ritrovata di due nobili amanti, published in 1530. It is the first time that story was ever told, and it is the text from which William Shakespeare would later take his cue for his tragedy. The villa, renewed in the eighteenth century, still stands where it was.

The rest of Montorso's history is the history of a hill they kept pulling down. The village formed in the eleventh century around the castle on the Fratta hill; Ezzelino the Third da Romano besieged it in 1236 and razed it in 1241; then the town passed to the Paduans, who rebuilt the castle, and in 1311 to the Scaligeri, who destroyed it again. What can be seen today on the Fratta is a medieval tower of the Scaliger period, and it is the only surviving evidence of the old parish church. The name is older than all of this: in the thirteenth century it was Montursium, in the fourteenth Montursio, and it probably derives from the Roman personal name Ursio, that is the mount of Ursio. With the dedication to Venice the village followed the fortunes of Vicenza, and on the twenty-fourth of April 1945, the day before the Liberation, Allied aircraft bombed the Villa district, killing four people. Every January, meanwhile, the village devotes a week to its fruit preserves.