Nanto

Nanto is a town of stone: from the Berici hills a soft amber-coloured stone is quarried here, the one called pietra di Vicenza, and it was probably quarried in Roman times already. Working it is still the trade of the place, and the stonecutters of Nanto no longer sell only in the neighbourhood; in odd years the town even holds an event about it, NantoPietra. In the rock, however, there is also something far older: in the Trene cave — a covolo which in the Middle Ages was fortified with a wall with loopholes — Palaeolithic finds have come to light, and among them the only Palaeolithic laurel-leaf point so far found in Italy.

The name appears for the first time in 1023, in a document by which the emperor Conrad II granted Nanto to the church of Vicenza, but where it comes from nobody knows: there are three hypotheses and not one of them is founded, namely the Celtic words naut or nantu, which mean stream and valley, a Germanic personal name, Nanth, and a legendary Roman city called Nantona. There was a castle, the castrum de Nanto of the episcopal investitures, and it was probably destroyed in the time of Ezzelino III da Romano and never rebuilt: even its position has been lost, and the only clue was the so-called turret on the hill of Nanto, which disappeared at the beginning of the last century. Squeezed between Vicenza and Padua, the town was plundered and burned by the Paduans in 1313. The town hall, curiously, was not at Nanto but in the hamlet of Ponte di Nanto; and since February 2026 Nanto is no longer a comune of its own, because it has merged with Castegnero into the new comune of Castegnero Nanto.