Amongst the races instigated by the City, we have precise records of one in 1340, when Treviso had just come under the reign of the Republic of Venice and Marino Falier was mayor.
In that year, and in many to follow, the race took place on December 6, feast of St. Nicholas. The Mayor would issue a proclamation, made public several days prior to the race, in the three principal piazzas of the City: the Duomo, the Carrubio (now the Piazza dei Signori) and St. Leonardo. This announcement informed all those who wished to take part that they must register their horse with the Mayor and stated that the first horse to reach the goal would win the Palio. The first prize usually consisted of several lengths of crimson velvet, the second a falcon or vulture. The prize for last was an allegoric "baffa porcina" (a prosciutto or a piece of pork lard). A third prize - a rooster - was added to the proclamations post-1340.

 

COMMUNAL STATUTES

The Trevisan statutes are a valuable, historical source and reflect the formation and growth of a society in the early centuries of a free-state. Officially collected from 1207, the manuscripts contain actual institutional laws and civic rights, showing a dynamic complex of norms and duties slowly integrating, clarifying, superimposed, eliminating themselves. These codes were in a state of metamorphous and change.
Treviso kept them all: a prime example of western european legal culture, respected by Venice. They express the advanced state of civilisation: in the organisation of services; in the definitions of hierarchies and magistratures; and in the harmony between law and order. They were products of the Maggior and Minor Consiglio dei Trecento (Major and Minor Council of the 300), which came from the primitive Concione or Arengo, an assembly of the total population.
The statutes show a complete separation of the communal "Jus" from the religious, with surviving elements from Roman and various barbaric rights. Saved by De Rossi in 1796, and critically studied and published by the eminent historian Mons. Giuseppe Liberali in 1955, they are a prime example of a city's universal culture.

               ecording this legendary episode seems to confirm this.
With the death of Carlo Magno in 814 and the fall of the Holy Roman Empire, Treviso began to hope for renewed freedom. Unfortunately, it had to suffer other bitter episodes: the invasion of the Hungarians who devastated the city in 898; the dominion of Berengario, Marquis of the Friuli region and later King of Italy (killed in Verona in 924); and, finally, the edicts of emperor Otto I of Saxony, who in 952 decreed the union of the Venezie to the Dukedom of Bavaria.