Colli Berici

The Colli Berici rise from the Veneto plain south of Vicenza like a limestone island suspended among the fields. They are not a chain but a compact, isolated massif, with gentle profiles that conceal a geological structure over a hundred million years old: the rock that forms them is the result of the slow sedimentation of sands and marine organisms on the floor of a prehistoric lagoon, an origin radically different from the volcanic one of the Colli Euganei, with which they are sometimes confused or compared. This difference in substance shows in the landscape, in the vegetation, in the colour of the earth.

The Berici limestone has left precise traces in the architecture of the city that faces it. For centuries the quarries opened on the hillsides supplied the stone with which Vicenza built its palaces, porticoes and churches, including many of the works that made Andrea Palladio famous. The bond between the hills and the city is thus material, literal: the same mineral substance that emerges in the woods is found again in the columns and cornices of Vicenza's historic centre.

The vegetation covering the slopes is dominated by hornbeams and downy oaks, with stretches of mixed woodland that change appearance with the seasons. Among the trees and along the ridges, vineyards and olive groves cultivated according to traditional practices open up, while the network of paths crossing the area leads to Venetian villas in various states of preservation and to small rural churches often without any tourist signage. It is a landscape that does not present itself, one that must be sought out.

It is precisely this absence of promotion that has spared the Berici from heavy visitor traffic. The large crowds that reach Vicenza rarely venture beyond the city walls, and the hilly massif remains a territory travelled mostly by locals and by hikers already familiar with the area. The silence of the paths on weekdays, the lack of widespread accommodation, the scarcity of mentions in general guidebooks: everything contributes to keeping the place in a condition of relative privacy, which is not neglect but simply distance from the main circuits.

Looking at the Colli Berici from the plain, on certain late-summer afternoons when the low light accentuates their profiles, one gets the image of a territory that has passed through the centuries without having to justify its existence to tourism. The quarried stone, the vineyards, the woods, the villas: each element has a function or a history that long precedes the idea of landscape as an object of consumption. It is this silent continuity, more than any single point of interest, that defines the character of the Berici.