Sesto al Reghena

The town is named after a milestone. Sesto comes from an expression of the kind ad sextum lapidem, the sixth stone: here stood a mansio six Roman miles from Concordia Sagittaria, and the name has stayed that of the distance. The first mention is in the document of 762 by which the abbey of Santa Maria in Silvis was given to that of Nonantola, «in loco qui vocatur Sexto»; the addition al Reghena, from the watercourse that laps the town, was made by decree only in 1867. The abbey had been founded a few decades before that document. In 899 the Hungarians ruined it, in the following century it rose again and was fortified, from 1441 to 1786 it was no longer an abbey but a commenda, that is an income, and it became an abbey again only in 1921.

Whoever goes in passes under Hell. The vestibule is painted entirely with the cycle of Hell, that of Paradise and that of Saint Michael, works of the middle of the fifteenth century attributed to the workshop of Antonio da Firenze; then one passes into the atrium, with three Romanesque naves, a massive fifteenth-century ceiling and thirteenth-century frescoes. Outside the town is the fountain of Venchieredo, one of the places of Friulian literature: Ippolito Nievo set several pages of the «Confessioni d'un italiano» there. And within its own boundaries the comune speaks two languages: Friulian at Bagnarola and Ramuscello, Venetian in the main village and at Marignana and Mure.