On 1996 a collaborator of the Civic Museum of Rovereto (TN, north-east Italy), found a fragment of native gold mineralization in the sands of the Leno creek, in Vallarsa. This finding aroused enormous interest and reopened a geologic case that seemed already closed. The presence of gold in the area had never been documented before, although old legends, local newspaper articles and even short professional notes repeatedly spoke of the “gold of Vallarsa”. Geological history and context do not appear compatible with the presence of a native gold mineralization and previous targeted investigations proved that the known mineralizations in Vallarsa and in the surrounding areas are not gold-bearing. In this work we present and discuss the results of a petrographic, mineralogical and lead (Pb) isotope investigation of the gold-bearing fragment in the vast geological context of the area and infer that the gold mineralization could be linked to shallow fluid circulation associated with the Tertiary magmatism of the Veneto Volcanic Province.