Brugnera

Around the year 1000 a castle went up beside the Livenza, which here was at once a road and a border: on the far side began the Trevigiano. In 1214 the fief was divided into two administrations, one to the lords of Prata and the other to those of Porcia, and Brugnera went with the second. In 1220 the Trevisan army destroyed the castle — and from then on the village stands on the right bank of the river, whereas before it stood on the opposite one. It moved across the water in order to defend itself better. When Venice arrived, the lords of Porcia avoided war by submitting of their own accord in 1418, and obtained leave to keep control of the fief they had just handed over. That border, moreover, can still be heard: here people speak not Friulian but a Venetian dialect, the rustic Trevisan they call liventino.

The territory is entirely flat: between the highest point, at Tamai, and the lowest, at San Cassiano, there are about ten metres of difference. The name appears in 1219 as Brugnara and comes from the plum tree, or from a place where that plant abounds; Maron, one of the hamlets, comes instead from a Celtic word meaning marsh. Along the Livenza stands Villa Varda with a park of some eighteen hectares, and in the village the palace of the counts of Porcia, built in the sixteen hundreds on the ruins of one of the oldest strongholds in the province. The parish church has two patrons because it inherited one: on the eighteenth of May 1840 the parish was transferred from the church of San Giacomo, which stood in the cemetery, to that of San Nicolò inside the walls, and the new church was consecrated to both. In the cemetery of Tamai lies general Federico Morozzo della Rocca, gold medal of the First World War, whom they called the hero of Monte Cengio.