Via Melia

Via Melia

Testimonies from the Roman period: the remains of a country villa are dated indicatively between the end of the 1st and the beginning of the 2nd century AD.

In 1986 masonry structures were identified, during work on the land of the previous agricultural company “Alla Melia”, that pertained to a Roman building, a rustic dwelling, of which both the planimetric development and the actual consistency were ignored in the state of conservation.

It was then hypothesised that in Roman times there must have been a village situated between the Este colony and the town of Vicenza, whose borders could have run along the centres of Teolo, Lovertino and Albettone. Most likely the toponym “Melia” takes the name of an ancient Roman consular road “via Emilia Altinate”, probably built by the Consul Marco Emilio Lepido around 175 BC.

An arm of this street probably crossed the flat land between the last bumps of the Berici hills and the facing slopes of the Euganei hills.

The excavations, which resumed in 2010, confirmed that a large settlement was located in Via Melia. Many finds, that are now kept in the Altino museum, came to light, including mosaic pavements, similar to those found in Altino (now Quarto D’Altino Venice). They also recovered a memorial stone with the initials IV G (a reference to the Roman centuriation,the system with which the Romans organised the agricultural territory) and found bricks bearing stamps and inscriptions.

Photos on page 34 and page 35 with captions