Paolo Lioy

An important visitor to Lake Fimon was the naturalist Paolo Lioy, who often came to these places during the nineteenth century, seeking out and collecting stories from the oldest inhabitants.

At three places I sought the secret of ancient days: the Grancare, the Casette, the Pascolone.
The landowners, although I compensated them for any damage, proved most reluctant to allow me to dig through that shifting, peaty ground, which, once disturbed, scarcely regains its firmness. I was therefore forced to be content with a few small trial excavations...
Nothing encouraged my investigations;
neither the fishermen nor the farmers
had been able to point out places where,
either while fishing or working in the fields,
they had come across pile dwellings.
I had several excavations carried out, without success, in those places that seemed to me the most promising along the ancient shores of the lake, overcoming,
not without considerable expense,
the reluctance of the owners.
And, believing both time and money to have been wasted, I was on the point of giving up when, at last, in the meadow called Pascolone, I discovered a pile dwelling whose traces I was able to follow over many square metres.
The stakes, more or less widely spaced and sometimes grouped together, have their tops emerging at ground level. One of them, now preserved in the museum of Vicenza, was driven into the clay.
Among these stakes lies the archaeological layer, filled with ancient remains.
It is a mixture of bones, fragments of pottery, twigs, reeds, wild fruits, flints and other worked stones, pieces of timber, ashes and charcoal...
These remains, discarded or lost, accumulated beneath the water while the huts stood above them; they rested on the ancient lake bed and were in turn buried.
Near the ruins I found, buried in the mud, a fragment of a small dugout canoe hollowed from a tree trunk with the aid of fire, traces of which it still bears.
The crude tools and weapons were made of wood, stone or bone; but they had lost their shape entirely, and the very few that were recovered
cracked and became misshapen almost as soon as they were exposed to the air.
Heaps of charred bones of deer and enormous wild boars, far larger than those of today!...
The pile dwellings, with their accumulations of debris, stone tools, broken pottery and the remains of meals, are the monuments that remain of the lakeside settlement of Fimon. But who were its inhabitants? Where did they come from? In what period did they build those crude huts?

I live by Lake Fimon and I have a great passion for Paolo Lioy. I went to the primary school in Lapio named after him. Paolo Lioy discovered the first pile dwellings here in the Fimon Valleys in 1864, and from that moment onwards more and more archaeological discoveries were made, with further discoveries made at the end of the nineteenth century and continuing right up to a few decades ago. The year after the discovery of 1864, Paolo Lioy received a letter from a friend in Padua asking whether Paolo Lioy could take him to see the discoveries. Unfortunately, the two were unable to meet. However, from their subsequent correspondence it emerged that Lioy’s friends had been greatly impressed by this place, which had revealed such an extraordinary heritage. Lioy, for his part, was very sorry that he had not been able to accompany them. I believe that this correspondence marks the beginnings of an early form of cultural tourism.