Fontanafredda

Fontanafredda lies exactly where one language turns into another. The comune falls within the area of protection of Friulian, but it sits in the transition belt between Venetian and western Friulian, and someone went to measure on the spot where the line runs: the surveys carried out at Vigonovo in 1966 and 1968 for the historical, linguistic and ethnographic atlas of Friuli recorded a genuine mixture. The vocabulary is substantially Venetian, but inside it there are markedly Friulian words — cjadena for chain, cjar for cart, forcja for fork — and traces can be recognised of the diphthongisation typical of Friulian. It is not a border but a shading, and it lies inside the same sentences. Vigonovo, moreover, is also the hamlet where the town hall stands: the comune bears one name and has its seat in another village.

The name means cold spring, and water returns in the most curious place of worship in the territory. In the hamlet of Nave stands the little church of Sant'Antonio, which was a destination of pilgrimages to ask for the miracle of rain, and which in all probability was built over an ancient pagan cult site dedicated to the divinities of the waters: people going to the same spot to ask for the same thing, changing the name of whoever must grant it. At Romano, instead, there is a church with a modern façade that gives no hint of what it keeps inside, a baroque wooden high altar and a holy water stoup carved by an anonymous stonecutter of Meduno. The communal coat of arms was granted in 1935 and then modified by a lieutenant's decree of the tenth of December 1944, which removed the fascist chief from it: a shield corrected by law.