Orgiano

To this village is attached the name of Paolo Orgiano, a petty lord whose doings have been studied for their likeness to the figure of don Rodrigo in the Betrothed: a real bully, with deeds and trials on record, of the kind Manzoni might have copied. Long before him, though, this place had done something rather different: in 1431 the Comune promulgated its first Statute, and the neighbouring villages took it as the model for their own civic regulations. Orgiano had become the seat of a civil vicariate under the Scaligeri, when in 1315 the bishop invested the Fracanzani with it, and that jurisdiction covered villages now scattered over seven different comuni. The Fracanzani, for that matter, are still here in stone: the villa Fracanzan Piovene, with its barchesse and its wide garden, dominates the village from above.

Around the year one thousand Orgiano had two castles, and the documents simply call them the old and the new. Of the castrum vetus, perhaps built by the Lombards, an act of investiture of 1263 still speaks as of a working building, while from an act of 1306 one understands that only ruins were left. The second, above the church, was episcopal property from the tenth century and was listed in the imperial diplomas of Otto the Third, Henry the Second, Frederick Barbarossa and Otto the Fourth: for that very reason it was not liable to the fodro tax. It took its worst damage in 1313, from the violent reaction of the Paduans after Vicenza passed to the Scaligeri; but the ruin was not total, because at the end of the sixteenth century Filippo Pigafetta could still write that Orgiano sat there with its castle, and the last remains can still be seen. As for the ground: on the heights behind the village fossils have been found of fifty or sixty million years ago, from when the sea was here; Monte delle Piume takes its name from the stipa pennata, a grass that in May clothes itself in long, snow-white feathery awns; at the edge of the plain stand the centuries-old mulberries whose leaves fed the silkworms; and there is a recess in the rock, called the Blue Grotto, which has been used yesterday as today as a stage for open-air performances.