Salcedo

Two torrents mark the boundaries of Salcedo and they are called Chiavone Bianco and Chiavone Nero, the white and the black: the names come from the colour of the pebbles they carry down, and the pebbles are of two colours because they come from two different eras — Cretaceous limestone for the first, Oligocene volcanic rock for the second. The hills here are indeed extinct volcanoes, full of fossil corals, molluscs and fish. The village's name, by contrast, is vegetal: it comes from the Latin salicetum, the willow wood, and until 1925 it was spelled Salzedo.

In the tenth century the emperor Berengar gave this territory to the bishop of Padua, with the obligation to build castles on it against the Hungarian raids; later Salcedo belonged to the Ezzelini, and in the family division of 1223 it went to Ezzelino III, the one who would be called the tyrant. In 1509, while the imperial troops were passing through, the people of Breganze took refuge on these hills and brought up here the devotion to Saint Anne and Saint Valentine, which stayed: on the hill of San Valentino there is a double sanctuary. The monument to the forty-six fallen of the First World War was raised in 1920, one of the first in Italy.