Polcenigo

At Polcenigo the Livenza is born, and people have lived around its springs for seven thousand years. In the area of the Palù — the name says it was a marsh — there was a Neolithic village of pile dwellings, which had at its disposal all the water, the plants and the game it needed; today that site is one of the hundred and eleven prehistoric pile-dwelling settlements around the Alps declared world heritage and protected by UNESCO since 2011. A little further on are the springs of the Livenza and that of the Santissima, which nineteenth-century maps called the «lake of the Livenza», and at the foot of the hill of San Floriano an Iron Age necropolis has come to light. The river, in short, is the reason this place exists.

The village, on the other hand, is not called by its own name in dialect: people simply call it Al Borc, the borgo. Above it stands the castle, rebuilt in the middle of the eighteenth century to a design by Matteo Lucchesi at the wish of Ottavio Polcenigo, on the ruins of the previous one: the lords of Polcenigo, later counts, had held the fief since the year one thousand. Below, along the streets of the borgo, are the palaces of the families that mattered — the Fullini-Zaia, which in 1809 hosted prince Eugène de Beauharnais, and palazzo Zaro, which the Manin bought from the counts and kept for two centuries. Not everything went smoothly, though: in 1499 the Turks got this far, coming up the Livenza, and reduced Polcenigo to a heap of rubble. Today the town belongs to the network of the most beautiful villages in Italy and houses a museum of the culinary art.