Le Colline del Prosecco di Conegliano e Valdobbiadene

The hills of Conegliano and Valdobbiadene lie in the Prosecco wine area of the Veneto, in north-eastern Italy. Steep hogback ridges run across the land, and people have worked and reshaped these slopes for centuries. In the second half of the 15th century the painter Giovanni Battista Cima da Conegliano used this landscape as the background of his religious paintings.

From the 17th century farmers planted vines on ciglioni, narrow grassy terraces, with rows running both along and down the slopes in a chequerboard pattern. The first land registers, from the 18th century, record the sharecropping system behind this mosaic of plots, and the earliest record of the Glera grape in the Veneto dates from 1754. After phylloxera in the 19th century a dense network of small and medium farms grew up, and around 1880 local farmers developed the bellussera, a high trellis system for training vines.

In 1962 eleven producers founded a consortium to protect the wine, in 1966 the first Italian wine route was opened here, and in 1969 Prosecco received DOC status. The World Heritage Committee referred the nomination back in 2018, and after the property was cut from about 20,300 hectares to about 9,200, it was inscribed on 7 July 2019 at the Committee's session in Baku, Azerbaijan.