Budoia

The name comes from the birches: from the Latin betullea, and already in 1299 it is found written in the form it has today. The village sits on the hills at the foot of monte Cavallo, crossed by the Artugna, and north of Dardago, in the San Tomé area, points, scrapers and arrowheads have come to light that take the first settlements back to the Neolithic. In the middle ages the counts of Polcenigo were in charge, holding jurisdiction and giving protection in exchange for tribute, and together with Polcenigo, in 1419, Budoia submitted to Venice. Officially Friulian is spoken here, but the regional border is close and the dialect is heavily venetised: in the nineteen sixties the linguist Giuseppe Francescato still found several Friulian traits in it, yet the contrast between weak and strong vowels was barely audible, and the lengthening of the vowels was by then wholly lost.

What makes Budoia recognisable, though, are the mushrooms. There is a mushroom museum, which the local description calls «the third in Italy for order and quality of display», and there is the feast of mushrooms and the environment, now at its fiftieth edition, which takes up the two central weekends of September with the regional mycological show, the conferences, the stalls of local produce and even a stamp exhibition; on the first Sunday the Artugna Challenge is ridden on mountain bikes, on the last the mushroom march is walked, and it goes up to twenty-four kilometres. Beyond the feast there remain the things that hold the village together: the little church of Santa Lucia in colle, of the fourteenth century, with a fresco by Gianfrancesco da Tolmezzo, and the Rujal, the stone structure that once carried water and that the ecomuseum has recovered and put back on the paths.