Maniago

Maniago is the city of the knife, and not just as a manner of speaking: the cutlery workshops set up here in artisan form go back to the Middle Ages, and to this day steel blades leave this town to end up in the knives, scissors and shears of half the world. The reason lies in its position: the town stands at the mouth of two valleys, the Val Cellina and the Val Còlvera, that is at the point where the plain meets the roads climbing towards the passes, and whoever works iron needs exactly this, the water coming down and the goods passing through. The name comes from Latin with a Celtic suffix and would mean land of Manilius; of the Celts, who were here from the third century before Christ, there would also survive the custom of lighting the Epiphany bonfires.

The first document that writes the name of Maniago is a diploma of the emperor Otto II, sent from Ravenna to the patriarch of Aquileia to confirm his possession of certain lands, among them the cortem que vocatur Maniacus, the court that is called Maniaco: it bears the date of the twelfth of January 981. The remarkable thing is that the document describes the boundaries of that court — between the waters of the Cellina and a stream, near a church — and that those references can still be identified on the ground. Walled into the façade of the cathedral are sculptural fragments of the eighth century, from the Lombard period, and the Lombards left a mountain name too: Monte Fara, because fara in their tongue means family. To the south stretch the magredi, where the Cellina and the Meduna sink into the aquifer and disappear underground, leaving a permeable and very poor plain of stones. The earthquake of 1976 had its epicentre a little to the north-east.