Schiavon

On 4 April 1391 Giangaleazzo Visconti, then lord of Vicenza, granted the noble Palazzi family the gentilitial fief of Schiavon. It is a date like many others, were it not for what stands beside it on the same line: the family collected the tithes of that fief until 1971. Six full centuries, from the plague to television. What paying them meant is said by a notarial document of 1471: at Longa, the other half of the comune, people went out stealing in order to manage to pay the tithe. For four centuries Schiavon and Longa remained two distinct rural communities, each led by a dean elected by the heads of households and assisted by the massari, who administered the parish and now and then acted as tax collectors too; and meanwhile the rich families of the city — the Chiericati among others — bought land here and built their country residences on it.

As for the name, it is best to distrust the obvious explanation. Schiavon seems to come from Sclavonum, an augmentative of slavus, and one would be tempted to connect it with the Slavs whom Venice brought in during the fifteenth century to repopulate the mainland countryside: except that the place name appears already in the thirteenth century, so that immigration has nothing to do with it. Another hypothesis links it to the Chiavone torrent, since in the past the place was known as Chiavón. Longa too is uncertain: perhaps from the Vicenza family of the Longo, perhaps from the long straight road that came from Vicenza, perhaps — more probably — from long fields, like Longare and Longarone. The castle, on the other hand, really did exist and nothing is known about it: in 1262 a register of the Comune of Vicenza names the castle moat, and in the early nineteenth century a meadow beside the parish church was still called the Castellano. Since the church of Santa Margherita is very ancient, one may suppose it was the fortification of the church itself, thrown up in the tenth century against the Hungarian raids. Today the village has a museum devoted to grappa, inside a distillery.