Euganean Hills

The Euganean Hills (Italian: Colli Euganei [ˈkɔlli euˈɡaːnei]) are a group of hills of volcanic origin that rise to heights of 300 to 600 m from the Padovan-Venetian plain a few km south of Padua. The Colli Euganei form the first Regional park established in the Veneto (1989), enclosing fifteen towns and eighty one hills.

History

The name memorializes that of the Euganei, an ancient people who inhabited the region upon contact with the Romans.

The Euganean Hills were formed in a sub-marine outwelling of basaltic lava during the Eocene, which was followed in the Oligocene by an episode of activity characterized by viscous magma, which formed deposits of trachyte.

The Euganean Hills, just visible from Venice, have been celebrated for their picturesque beauty and their hot springs. In the Euganean Hills, at Arquà, which now bears his name attached to it, Petrarch found peace and harmony towards the end of his life. He discovered the village in 1369; there, he stated in his letter to posterity, "I have built me a house, small, but pleasant and decent, in the midst of slopes clothed with vines and olives,"—a house that may be seen there today. The Euganean hills, like an archipelago of steep-sided wooded islands rising from the perfectly flat agricultural plain, inspired the setting of Percy Bysshe Shelley's Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills; Shelley likens the hill he has found himself upon, at first to an island in "the deep wide sea of Misery", then he sees that

Euganei

The Euganei (fr. Lat. Euganei, Euganeorum; cf. Gr. εὐγενής (eugenēs) 'well-born') were a semi-mythical Proto-Italic ethnic group that dwelt an area among Adriatic Sea and Rhaetian Alps. Subsequently, they were driven by the Adriatic Veneti to an area between the river Adige and Lake Como, where they remained until the early Roman Empire.

They may have been a Pre-Indo-European people, ethnically related to the Ingauni, as suggested by the similarity of the names. According to Pliny the Elder the Stoni people from Trentino were of the same stock as the Euganei.

Cato the Elder, in the lost book of Origines, counted among the major tribes Euganeans the Triumplini of Val Trompia and the Camunni of Val Camonica.

According to Livy, they were defeated by the Adriatic Veneti and the Trojans. Their descendants settled west of the Athesis (Adige) river, around the lakes Sebinus, Edrus and Benacus, where they occupied 34 towns, which were admitted by Augustus to the rights of Latin municipalities.