Vialone Nano Veronese PGS Rice Tour
Route details Departure pointIsola della Scala Arrival pointOppeano

The tour kicks off at Buttapietra, about 15 km south of Verona, following the provincial road leading to Vigasio, and immediately coming across Villa Giuliari at Settimo di Gallese. Built in the seventeenth century from a design by architect Alessandro Pompei, the villa took on its current neoclassical appearance the following century. A short detour to the municipal road "Alpone" will lead you to the isolated Corte Zera Bampi, which dates back to the late seventeenth century, and its oratory dedicated to St. John the Baptist.

Approaching Vigasio you will come across La Zambonina. This sixteenth-century architectural complex with Italian garden, whose modern-day design is tinged in Baroque style, is a rare example on the Verona plain. The frescoes in the loggia showing work in the rice fields, whose cultivation was widespread in the seventeenth century, are particularly interesting.

Just outside of the center of Nogarole Rocca is the court which gives the municipality its name: Corte Nogarole known as the "La Rocca". Continuing through the countryside, in Grezzano di Mozzecane you will encounter the majestic Villa Canossa Canossa once home to the Marchesi Canossa. On the outskirts of Mozzecane, in San Zeno, is Villa Miniscalchi which took on its present appearance in the first half of the seventeenth century. 
The route makes a U-turn and heading toward Bagnolo di Nogarole Rocca you will find the local parish church which preserves a fine Baroque marble altar and a Mantegna-style triptych. After Trevenzuolo you will reach Isola della Scala where the Torre Scaligera awaits. The fortress has a tower and a lunette with two drawbridges, all built to guard a ford on the river Tartarus.

The tour will come to an end and along a long, lonely road you will reach Villa Pindemonte in Vo '. This neoclassical villa was built in 1742. The picturesque stately mansion is still surrounded by a large garden and paddy-fields today. The last, short piece of the route takes us back to Buttapietra.

Lovers of good cuisine along the road can discover a unique and genuine product: Veronese  Vialone Nano Rice, cultivated on land irrigated with resurgence waters, protected with the European PGI trademark. The Veronese Vialone Nano, prepared with meat, fish, vegetables, offers itself to gourmets as the king of risotto rices.

The rice huskers were veritable "factories" characterised by apple wood pestles, put in motion by wheels powered by the current of the rivers, beating the grain with a percussive action to free it from the yellow protective husk.  This processing system was replaced by more modern systems based on rotary mills, but today the few surviving piston huskers are real testimonies of industrial archaeology.