The lakeside hamlet

We are in this valley, known as the Valley of Lake Fimon, not to be confused with the Valley of Fimon, which lies on the other side. Here, where we are now, until the mid-fifteenth century, there was nothing but a lake stretching all the way to Longara. It was therefore a very large lake, and it belonged to the Municipality of Vicenza. Then, in 1348, the city of Vicenza sold it to private owners, ten wealthy families from Vicenza, and this area was bought by the Pigafetta family. Jokingly, we can say that Pigafetta learned to row and sail on Lake Fimon. Around 1550, Venice, at the request of the villages around the lake, decided to drain this area. Within a few decades, what had once been a lake became a semi-marsh; so, from an agricultural point of view, it was not a great success. This lake remained, as did the small Lake Fontega. Then, in 1930, Lake Fontega was drained, and only Lake Fimon remained.
The Lakeside Hamlet touches on my own personal and family history, because, according to the research and studies I have carried out, the hamlet was probably founded by our ancestors, rather like the story of Romulus and Remus. Towards the end of the thirteenth century, a man called Bertoldo came down from Lapio and settled by the lake. It was there that the Dal Lago lineage began. The surname started to spread around the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Little by little, the Dal Lago family gradually expanded and, until the Second World War, who lived by the lake? The Dal Lagos lived here, together with a couple of other families, the Valdemarca and the Marangoni. In short, it was our territory. Then, of course, after the Second World War there was a major exodus. The hamlet emptied out; I wouldn’t say it died, but almost. We are left with four or five old-timers keeping watch over the place. What did these people do for a living? What did these people live on? They lived from fishing. Then, in the 1930s, tourism began to develop. There was a great flow of people from Vicenza, the well-to-do people of Vicenza who came to the lake. To tell the truth, after the Second World War there were even more people coming here from Padua because there was a dance hall. On Sunday afternoons people danced, and there are remarkable photographs showing just how many people used to come to the lake on Sundays. Tourism then declined, though not in the sense of disappearing; rather, it became more superficial. People come out on Saturday afternoons and Sunday mornings, clog up the road with cars, and appreciate nothing of the surrounding nature. They eat a sandwich, drink a Coca-Cola or a spritz, and that is the end of it. Then there was the period of the dance halls in the 1970s and 1980s. That was even worse, because they stayed open from around half past eleven at night until two or three in the morning, causing considerable disturbance not only to us humans but also to the wildlife and the birds. In fact, the birds we used to have are no longer here. Now there are swans. Who knows where they came from.