Cormons

The name has a pre-Latin substratum: it probably comes from the name of a person or of a people, Carmo, from which the Gaulish Carmones also took their name — and that tribe owed its own name to a weasel or an ermine, which it had made its totem. On Monte Quarin, the hill above the town, the Lombards raised a fortress to hold off the Avars. And from 628, for more than a century, Cormons was the seat of the patriarchs of Aquileia: the schism of the Three Chapters had produced two patriarchs at the same time, and while one took refuge at Grado the other moved his seat here, safer and not too far from Aquileia. The schism was closed in 731 by recognising both seats as legitimate, and shortly afterwards the patriarch moved on to Cividale.

In 1497 the count of Gorizia, Leonardo, was forced by Maximilian I of Habsburg to sign a legacy in the emperor's favour in order to avoid war; at his death Cormons passed with the whole county to the Habsburgs, who kept it until the First World War. The Südbahn railway joined it to Vienna and to the Italian network, and from 1866 its station became the customs post on the border between the Austro-Hungarian empire and Italy: it was that growth that Franz Joseph recognised when, by a bull of 1910, he granted Cormons the title of city. Meanwhile, in the August of that same 1866, in a villa of the town an Italian general and an Austrian plenipotentiary had signed the armistice that closed the Third War of Independence. In the last war Cormons was liberated twice: the partisans took it at the end of April 1945, the Germans tried to reoccupy it the next day, then came Serb troops in German service — and only in the first days of May did a New Zealand armoured unit disarm them and free the town for good.