Cordovado

The name says something very concrete: court of the ford, from the Latin vadum. In 1126 a document names a «Martinus de cort de Vat», and the ford really was there, on a branch of the Tagliamento now dried up, along the road that climbed from Roman Concordia towards Noricum. The old borgo, the one round the castle, probably grew on the remains of the castrum that guarded that crossing, and in March 2023 the archaeological soundings for a gas pipeline found at Belvedere, one metre seventy down, the remains of two Roman buildings and of the road that divided them: a paved surface with the cart ruts still visible.

There is, though, another explanation of the name, corde vadum, «in the heart of the ford». Scholars consider it groundless, but it is the one that won: the heart ended up in the arms of the village, where it appears flaming above a river in a decree of 1938 that was never found in the town archives. In 2012 the council opened the procedure for a new emblem, with the flames taken away and the heart plunged in the water, to go back to the «heart of the ford». The rest of the story was written by the bishops of Concordia, who had their summer residence here, by a gastaldo who also held criminal jurisdiction and by a statute of the village's own dated 1337, before Venice arrived in 1420. The walled borgo, with its two gate towers, is today among the most beautiful villages of Italy.