The defended settlement of Fondo Pavini, situated on the western edge of the paleo-valley of the river Menago, in the heart of the Valli Grandi Veronesi, has been known since the mid 1970s. Although the hub of a political-territorial system which included all of the lower Veronese plain and well known for its contacts with continental Europe, peninsula Italy and the Aegean-Mycenaean world, the site has been the object of somewhat limited investigations (1970s: surface survey and trail trenches – Museo Civico di Storia Naturale di Verona, Archaeological Superintendency of Veneto; 1983: trial trenches – Archaeological Superintendency of Veneto; 1989: survey and analysis of exposed sections – “Alto-Medio Polesine/Basso Veronese” project – Padua University, Lancaster University, Queen Mary College – London). For this reason, in 2007 a team from the University of Padua, led by Giovanni Leonardi and Michele Cupitò, began a new research project on the site, the “Progetto Fondo Paviani”, with the aim of conducting a systematic investigation of the settlement through high intensity survey and open area excavations.

No open area excavation was started during the 2007 campaign, work being limited to the examination of a 90 m long section along an agricultural ditch cutting the northern part of the site on an east-west axis and of the profiles of four trenches opened along the north-south fill. At the same time a survey was undertaken using a regular 5 × 5 m grid in the area between the above mentioned ditches (covering a total of 4,500 m2) and surface checks were made in adjacent areas. The analysis of the section, useful for the continuation of the research with open area excavation, redefined the sequence of the main settlement phases and clarified both the chronology of the single cycles and of the evolutionary trends of the site’s perimeter defences. In this sense it was seen that: 1) the site was created on a series of sandy humps of fluvial origin during the transition from the Middle Bronze Age 3 to the Recent Bronze Age and, in this phase, it was only surrounded by a ditch and, perhaps, a palisade; 2) in the later Recent Bronze Age an imposing system of fortifications was created comprising a large embankment and a second wide ditch; 3) the site remained active until sometime during the early phases of the Final Bronze Age.

The trial trenches opened along the north-south fill were dug mainly to check the state of preservation of the anthropological deposits in an area for which there are no published records. However, they revealed local sequences that differed, some considerably, from the main sequence in the east-west section. Surface investigations led to the recovery of a substantial sample of materials, thus confirming the validity of the overall chronology which emerged from the section. Without doubt the most important survey find was constituted by two fragments of Aegean-Myceneaen plain ware pottery.