Pozzoleone

Until the middle of the eighteen hundreds this village was simply called Pozzo, the well, the Putheum of the Latins. Then the mayor of the day wanted it told apart from all the other Pozzos in Italy, and a royal decree of the eighteenth of August 1867 turned it into Pozzoleone. The addition was not invented: it was copied from the parish seal, which since the Middle Ages had shown a lion beside a well. In 1929 the arms were recognised with exactly that in them, a well and a rampant lion: canting arms, which say the name out loud. The place appears in writing very early — probably already in the great donation of the twenty-ninth of April 1085 made by the forefathers of the Ezzelini and by the Camposampiero to a Cluniac monastery, where a certain Petrum de Pozo is named, and again on the tenth of June 1180, when a Henricus and a Petrus Bonus de Pozo sit in the council of two hundred of Padua. But the surest date is 1262, and the reason for it says a good deal: the comune of Vicenza was drawing up a list of the villages of its district in order to recover the property Ezzelino had confiscated, and among the forty-six ville of the quarter of Santo Stefano there was Putheum.

The land here was marsh, unhealthy, and it was the Benedictines who dried it out with patient work; today it is fertile, all irrigated permanent meadows for fodder, and the fodder becomes cattle and the cattle become Grana Padano and Asiago. In via Vegra di sopra stands villa Gonzato, and it is worth looking at closely: it was a Ghibelline tower of the second half of the thirteen hundreds, and in the second half of the fifteen hundreds it was converted from defensive to residential use. The merlons were not pulled down. They are still there, swallowed into the fabric of the house and covered by the roof. At Scaldaferro there is a sanctuary born of a small fresco of 1665 painted on the outside wall of a stable: the Virgin wears a violet apron over her queen's mantle, like a nurse of heaven, and they call her the Health of the Sick. Devotion turned the niche into a shrine, and in 1715 the Venetian nobles Venier, who had lands here, built an octagonal templet around it; then the pilgrims came, and the church had to be enlarged.