Prata di Pordenone

In the middle of the village there is a mine museum, and the men who made it are the men who worked in the mine. They were Friulian emigrants who went down the coal pits abroad, above all in Belgium; the objects on show come from the pit at Roton. Home again, marked by silicosis, by the memory of the accidents and the hard labour, by the difficulty of fitting in and by the hostility they met, and urged on by one of their own, Luigi Agnoletto, they rebuilt a gallery here with their tools, their photographs and their papers, so that a difficult stretch of our history — Marcinelle, on the eighth of August 1956, among others — should stay in memory. The museum is dedicated to Saint Barbara, patron of miners, and it is also a shrine: mass is celebrated inside it. In 2009 the association of former miners gave it to the comune.

A few dozen metres from the church of San Simone there is a wayside shrine with a fresco: a Madonna enthroned holding the Child, who holds an apple in his left hand. It is the work of Gianfrancesco da Tolmezzo, dated 1499, and that shrine is all that remains of a far larger oratory, demolished around 1940 to widen the road at the crossroads. They pulled down the building and kept the apse, because the people were devoted to that painting; the restoration is of 2017. The rest of Prata is Gothic stone: in the fourteenth-century temple of San Giovanni dei Cavalieri lie the tomb slabs of two priests and above all the ark of Nicolò da Prata and Caterina di Castrucco, of 1344, with the Madonna and Child between two saints carved in low relief and attributed to a collaborator of Andriolo de Santi. The church of Santi Simone e Giuda is already named in the will that Guecello II of Prata made on the seventh of August 1262.