San Vito di Leguzzano

The village belonged for centuries to the Benedictines of the monastery of Santi Felice e Fortunato in Vicenza, and it shows in the name: Saint Vitus is a saint of their devotion, and until 1500 the parish priest was appointed by the abbot. A priory probably existed here before the year one thousand, and a privilege of bishop Rodolfo of 983 alludes to it. The second half of the name comes instead from the mountain above the village, called mons luguzani in the charters of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: until 1867 the municipality was simply San Vito. In the thirteenth century German-speaking settlers, the cimbri, were called in to clear the woods and bring the upper land under cultivation.

Of that craft work an organised memory survives: at Corte Priorato there is an ethnographic museum devoted to woodworking, with the ordinary tools of carpentry and the particular ones of cartwrights and coopers, trades documented at San Vito since the early fifteenth century, and with more than two thousand seven hundred objects of daily life. In the church of San Valentino, at Leguzzano, stands a marble altar of 1579 by Bartolomeo Mercante, a local stonecutter. And from San Vito came Amelia Barbieri, midwife and lay missionary, who brought Rwandan orphans to safety during the genocide.