Asiago Culture

Cimbrian is the plateau's deepest cultural layer -- a Germanic language descended from medieval Bavarian, once spoken across all seven communes and now barely surviving, though the place names and family names are everywhere and there is an active effort to record it.

Asiago cheese is the daily reality: a DOP cheese in two forms, the young pressato and the aged d'allevo, and at altitude the summer malga production, which is a different and much smaller thing than the industrial output.

The war is a living part of local identity rather than a historical topic. Almost every family lost the town itself, and the landscape is still full of what happened -- which is why writers from here return to it. Mario Rigoni Stern, born in Asiago in 1921 and the author of Il sergente nella neve, is the plateau's own voice.

The food is mountain food: polenta, game, mushrooms, tosèla, honey from the plateau's meadows, and the cheese in every form.