Valdagno

It was here, in 1836, that the Marzotto family started its wool business, taking it in three generations from an artisan workshop to a giant able to buy up brands such as Valentino. Gaetano Marzotto junior, running the company from the nineteen-thirties, did not stop at the factories: on the far bank of the Agno he had the Città sociale built, a whole district with a nursery, schools, a retirement home, a swimming pool and a stadium, conceived as a model for integrating work and family life. At the heart of that project stood the Teatro Impero, eighteen hundred and sixty-one seats in tribute to Italian unification, opened in 1937 as a monument to the alliance between industry and the regime: after the war it was renamed Teatro del Popolo and hosted socialist meetings, then became the Cinema Rivoli, until in the nineteen-eighties its facade was torn down to make way for flats.

Valdagno paid a heavy price to the Resistance: on the third of July 1944 seven partisans were killed, and the town was later awarded the silver medal for military valour. Today the Favorita park, laid out in the thirties on the same Marzotto family's orders and reopened to the public in 2008 after a long municipal restoration, remains the town's largest green lung. Across a range of altitude from 214 to 1,340 metres, the territory also keeps eighteen former nineteenth-century silk mills, nearly all converted now, and for decades it was home to the Jolly Hotels chain, another creation of the Marzotto group.