Zoppola

The castle was built around the eleventh or twelfth century to guard the road that ran from the ford over the Tagliamento to Pordenone. It changed hands more than once, until in 1405 castle and jurisdiction were assigned to the family of Antonio Panciera, bishop of Concordia, later patriarch of Aquileia and cardinal — and to that family the stronghold still belongs. Of the old defensive system only the keep survives, and truncated at that; but the inner courtyard keeps the frescoes of Pomponio Amalteo, and the cardinal's little study is still there, with its gilded and painted wooden ceiling.

The village appears in 1103 as Zaupola; the root is the one that gives the Friulian ciaup, a trunk, then a trough and by extension a drinking place, a pool. But in 1259 the documents call it Zaupola Romana, and that adjective probably served to tell it apart from a nearby settlement that spoke another language, presumably Slovene: the border between two tongues, written inside a thirteenth-century paper. Zoppola lies within the area of protection of Friulian, and Venetian is spoken here too. Of another castle, the one the bishop of Concordia had built at Cusano in 1268 over an earlier fortification, nothing remains: the traces were lost in the eighteen hundreds, when the railway was built. In the little church of Ovoledo, on the webs of the vault, Girolamo del Zocco painted the evangelists accompanied by musician angels; in the same church a wall carries a dreamlike decoration of grotesques.