Val Liona

In the hamlet of Pederiva there are still two watermills, the Piombino and the Dugo, and they are not alike: one works by push, the other by weight — in one case the water pushes the wheel, in the other it turns it by falling onto it. The Dugo goes back to 1410 and was last restored in 1999. The wooden parts most subject to wear have been replaced bit by bit with iron since the end of the nineteenth century; then, in the second half of the twentieth, the electric motor came and the water stopped being needed. The valley is that of the Liona watercourse, which gives the comune its name: it opens wide onto the plain between Orgiano and Sossano and climbs northward among the Berici hills, and along its floor the villages lie one after another, Campolongo, Villa del Ferro, San Germano dei Berici, Spiazzo, Pederiva; after Spiazzo it narrows.

The comune, on the other hand, is new: it was born in February 2017 from the merger of Grancona and San Germano dei Berici, and the town hall is at Pederiva. Its arms are described in the statute but have not yet been granted by decree. What the two comuni brought with them is in the churches and the villas: in the parish church of San Germano, already recorded at the end of the thirteenth century and rebuilt in the eighteenth, there is an altarpiece by Giovanni Battista Pittoni; at Spiazzo an image of the Sorrowful Virgin is venerated, a fifteenth-century fresco attributed to Battista da Vicenza, in a church whose belltower with its two-light loggia had its orientation changed around 1956. Then villa Vajenti, with a great barchessa of seven arches and a long portico joining it to an eighteenth-century chapel attributed to Francesco Muttoni, and villa Giacometti, late Gothic, at Villa del Ferro.