Caneva

Under the Cansiglio, near the Bus de la Lum, hunters left the flints of their camp around eleven thousand years before Christ. Then, at Palù del Livenza, people lived for a thousand years or so on posts driven into the marsh: it is the pile-dwelling site richest in archaeological material in Europe, and since 2011 it has been a world heritage site along with the other prehistoric settlements of the Alps. The name of the town is far more modest: it comes from the Latin cannaba, the cellar, the store, and the first mention, an indirect one, is in a document of 1249 that speaks of the church of Saint Michael between Sacile and Caneva. The rest is told by the stone. Caneva is a town of quarries and quarrymen, and here everything is made of stone: the houses, the walls between the fields, the roads, every sort of artefact.

In the words there are three languages laid one over another. The dialect is Venetian, of the Livenza type, but underneath it is Friulian: certain words — madràs for the snake, batidór, ratha and rathòt for the duck and the drake — suggest that the Venetian imposed itself on an older Friulian; and then there are a few Slavisms, left by a small colonisation in the time of the patriarchs. Documented as a possession of the Church of Aquileia from 1034, Caneva was fought over between the Patria del Friuli and the men of Treviso; the Carraresi of Padua occupied the castle in 1385 and the Venetians took the town in 1420. Of the castle there remain the bases of some walls and the remnants of a tower, and inside the enclosure a little church and a bell tower made out of an old one. For a century and a half people left this place: the Americas, Switzerland, Belgium, Australia, and it stopped only in the sixties. At Fratta there is a museum of the miner, and what it keeps is above all the relics of the men of Caneva who went to dig in Belgium.