Montereale Valcellina

In 1532 Domenico Scandella was born here, whom everyone called Menocchio: he was a miller, and he thought for himself. Four and a half centuries later the historian Carlo Ginzburg reconstructed his ideas in a book of 1976, «The Cheese and the Worms», which has become a classic of microhistory: a miller from a mountain village does not usually leave a written trace of what he thinks, and the paradox is that of Menocchio we know a great deal. At Montereale there is a cultural circle that bears his name and works precisely on him. The place, for that matter, has a depth one would not expect: in the palaeo-Venetic necropolis of Dominu, Bronze Age finds have come to light that take human settlement back to the fourteenth century before Christ, and Pliny, in the Naturalis historia, names among the cities of Regio X a Caelina that nobody has ever managed to find.

The other thing this village has given the world is light. In the hamlet of Malnisio stands the hydroelectric power station named after A. Pitter, the first that made it possible to light the lamps of piazza San Marco in Venice: today it is a museum, and between 2007 and 2015 it was also a branch of the Immaginario Scientifico of Trieste. It is a strange thought that the light of the most photographed square in Italy set out from here, where the Cellina comes down out of the mountain. Of the castle that gave the village its name, the Castrum Montis Regalis, only ruins remain; in the church of San Rocco, inside the cemetery, there are a cycle of sixteenth-century frescoes and an altarpiece by Giovanni Maria Zaffoni of Pordenone. On the arms, granted in 1955, there are three mountains and a torrent passing under a single-arched bridge. Here, alongside Italian, western Friulian is spoken.