Bassano del Grappa historical timeline

Origins

The settlement grew at the river crossing, and a wooden bridge is documented here from 1209. The Ezzelini family, the dominant power in the thirteenth-century Veneto, held the town and left the castle that still stands in the centre.

Turning points

Bassano submitted to Venice in 1404 and remained Venetian until 1797, developing as a centre of ceramics, printing and, later, distilling under the Republic's stability.

Influential people

Jacopo dal Ponte, known as Jacopo Bassano, born here around 1510, led a family workshop that produced four painter sons and a distinctive Venetian style full of night scenes, animals and country labour. The Remondini printing house made the town a European centre of popular prints in the eighteenth century.

Cultural evolution

Nardini began distilling at the bridgehead in 1779, the first commercial grappa distillery in Italy, on a site it still occupies.

Present-day significance

In 1917-18 the front line ran across Monte Grappa, and the mountain became the hinge on which the Italian defence held after Caporetto. The town was bombarded and occupied; more than twenty thousand dead lie in the summit ossuary. In 1928 Bassano formally added del Grappa to its name. The bridge, destroyed again in 1945, was rebuilt in 1948 by the Alpini regiments whose name it now carries.