Vo', City of Wine

"Vo', City of Wine and Trachyte": the art installation at the entrance of the municipality reminds of its excellence.

The new square is large and streamlined, with the municipal headquarters at the bottom and a plaque commemorating the 70 young men from Vadenza who fell in the Great War. One always finds it hard to believe. In the center rises the monument honoring their memory: a column more than ten meters high, demonstrating that trachyte is not only stone for paving - for masegni, they say in Venice - but also for fine workmanship, from the grooves of the shaft to the volutes of the capital. At the top is an eye-catching bronze statue, a Saint Just with the palm of martyrdom in one hand and the symbol of the city of which he is patron, Trieste, in the other. A nonconformist choice, the merit of Vicenza sculptor Giuseppe Zanetti, who looked to the city regained to the tricolor thanks in part to the sacrifice of those young men, sublimating them into the figure of the martyr whom the calendar remembers on November 2, on the Day of the Dead, to be exact.

Shaking me from these thoughts is a bell that strikes the hour calling me back to more prosaic endeavors. At the entrance to the village it reads "Vo', City of Wine," and so wine it is. I pass through the door of the Doc Consortium without delay , where, among other things, the museum that introduces the oenological wonders of the Euganean Hills is set up. An ancient history, which has its symbol in the so-called Situla Benvenuti, an embossed bronze ritual bucket from the 7th century B.C., unearthed in the necropolis of Este. That is to say, more than 2,500 years ago the ancient Venetians chose to intoxicate themselves with wine in order to have perception of the otherworldly. Better a glass of red, I am told as a good Venetian, than opium or peyote.

At the Doc consortium in Vo', the section of the MUVI, Euganean Hills Wine Museum, which deals with the characteristic grapes of the area.

A few remarkable concepts remain from the visit: that the most typical Euganean white, Serprino, is the ancestor no less than Prosecco; that Merlot and Cabernet in these volcanic soils express themselves as rarely elsewhere; that the very special Moscato Fior d'Arancio has a bouquet of aromas ranging from mango to dried fig... Try it to believe, in the so-called 'emotional room,' which closes the tour with a guided tasting.

Experience of the day, suggested by the visit: lukewarm salad of Paduan hen, - yes, just the one "with the big tuft," described in Aldovrandi's Renaissance tables, - with a glass of Moscato Fior d'Arancio, which in a dry version will be able to go along with the sweet and sour of the recipe. Surprising.