Quinto Vicentino

The name is a number: the village stands at the fifth Roman milestone from Vicenza, along the via Postumia that joined Genoa to Aquileia. A Roman mile came to about fourteen hundred and eighty metres, so Quinto lay some seven and a half kilometres from the city. The town hall today is housed in villa Thiene, which Andrea Palladio built in the fifteen-forties, probably starting from a design by Giulio Romano; the building was later thoroughly reworked by Francesco Muttoni, before 1740, and it is to him that its present appearance is owed.

The historians Barbarano and Pagliarino speak of a «very strong castle» that the da Lanzè nobles, settled here since the twelfth century, held in this place: no documents have been found, but it is likely that they built it and that it was destroyed during the struggles between Vicenza and Padua. Towards the middle of the fourteenth century, under the Scaligeri, Quinto was placed under the civil vicariate of Camisano, and so it remained even under Venice until the end of the seventeen-hundreds; in 1404 it entered with Vicenza the mainland domains of the Serenissima and stayed there until the passage to Austria, in 1797. The parish church of San Giorgio was already a parish church when the Rationes decimarum were drawn up, at the end of the thirteenth century. And here, on 4 November 1924, was born Urbano Lazzaro, the partisan who went by the name of Bill: vice political commissar of the Puecher detachment of the fifty-second Garibaldi brigade, on the morning of 27 April 1945 he was at the checkpoint just outside Musso when a German column was stopped, and it was he who recognised and arrested Benito Mussolini.