The name comes from saint Orso, and the legend that explains it is a strong one. Orso was a French nobleman who lived in Charlemagne's time and became king of Dalmatia; in a fit of rage born of jealousy he killed his father, his wife and his son. Repentant, he asked pope Adrian the First for pardon, and along with absolution he was given as penance a pilgrimage to every sanctuary then known. When he reached Salzena, at the foot of Monte Summano, he understood he had come to his goal; but as soon as he began to climb the mountain, on 3 May of the year 800, he died, and the local people found him with his pilgrim's staff in flower. His relics now lie in the sanctuary that overlooks the town. There are more prosaic hypotheses too: that the name comes from the counts of Vicenza, related to the Orseolo, or from the Lombard family of the Beroaldi, because in German Bär means bear.
In Roman times the settlement was called Salzena and was one of the richest villas of the Vicenza country: at Prà Laghetto the remains of a villa have come to light with bronze statuettes, among them a winged Victory. The road that came from Vicenza served as the axis of the centuriation of the upper Vicentino, and in the whole Summano area the wool trade flourished — the locality Garziere still recalls the carding. In 910, to face the raids of the Hungarians, emperor Berengar the First gave the bishop of Vicenza three curtes, among them that of Salzena, and the bishop filled the territory with castles. The quarrels between the bishops and the Maltraversi counts, who tried to usurp those fiefs, ended in blood: in 1184 bishop Giovanni de Surdis Cacciafronte was killed by a hired man from Malo, and in 1202 his successor Pistore died in a clash near the castle of Belvicino. Between 1474 and 1480, finally, the first movable-type printing house of the Vicenza country worked at Santorso, founded in villa Ca' Zeno by the rich merchant and paper-maker Enrico da Ca' Zeno with his son Giovanni Maria: Giovanni del Reno and Leonardo Achates of Basel worked there, come from Padua.
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📅 Every year, on 3 May, at the place where the saint arrived on his penitential pilgrimage
Santorso celebrates Saint Ursus on 3 May, in the shrine dedicated to him. Tradition tells that, as penance, he was made to undertake a pilgrimage to the shrines known at the time, until he arrived at Salzena, at the foot of Monte Summano.
Stockfish, milk, oil and anchovies, cooked for hours over the lowest heat: baccalà alla vicentina arrived from Norway with a shipwreck in 1432.
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The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Santorso, but an easy day trip away.
