Sossano

The village's name is a promise of good health. The historian Barbarano explained it that way, Celsano as if cielo sano, healthy sky, because the air here is wholesome, and the comune believed it enough to put it on its arms: a silver bar bearing the word Coelsanus separates a clear sky with a sun of sixteen rays from a night sky with a crescent moon between two stars. The real origin is probably more prosaic: a fundus Celsianus, the farm of one Celsius, with the suffix that in Rome marked land assigned to veterans.

The castle, one of the few in the lower Vicenza plain not built by the bishops, was raised by the Pilei shortly after the year one thousand; the Paduans pulled it down in 1313 and nobody raised it again, so that by 1399 an episcopal deed already calls it the old castle. The promise in the name, on the other hand, was taken seriously in 1428, when plague was raging through the Venetian lands and Venetian humanists and men of letters came here for shelter: once the epidemic was over the church of the Santo Sepolcro was built, and from it comes the dead Christ carved by Niccolò da Venezia. From Sossano, too, came the sculptor Bartolomeo Cavazza, the young Palladio's first master.