The cheese and the First World War memorials
North of Vicenza, at about 1,000 metres, the Asiago plateau, or Altopiano dei Sette Comuni, is a vast upland of meadows, pastures, spruce forests and villages, enclosed by mountains rising to over 2,000 metres. For centuries it was home to a community of Germanic origin, the Cimbri, who governed themselves as the Federation of the Seven Communes under Venice and whose language survives in place names.
The plateau was one of the bloodiest fronts of the First World War: from 1915 to 1918 Italian, Austro-Hungarian and British troops fought here, and the villages, including Asiago, were completely destroyed. Trenches, forts, tunnels and military cemeteries recall those events, especially the Sacrario Militare di Asiago, on the Leiten hill, a monumental ossuary holding the remains of over 54,000 soldiers, and open-air museums on Monte Ortigara and Monte Zebio. Today the plateau is known for Asiago cheese PDO, in its fresh "pressato" and aged "d'allevo" versions, made in the dairies and mountain huts, for cross-country skiing in winter, and for hiking and cycling in summer. Asiago also has an astronomical observatory of the University of Padua.
Tip: in summer, the "malghe", mountain dairies, sell cheese directly; the writer Mario Rigoni Stern, who lived here, described the plateau in his books.
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