Aiello del Friuli

Aiello, for four centuries, was on the other side of the border. After the Venetian period, from 1516 to 1918 it belonged to the Habsburg empire, inside the princely county of Gorizia and Gradisca, and from that time there remain the imposing noble villas of the landowners and, in the central streets, the small houses of the servants; in piazza Roma stands the statue of Saint John Nepomucene, protector against floods, who is a saint of the empire. The village still belongs today to the archdiocese of Gorizia and not to that of Udine, and it passed to the province of Udine only in 1923. Emilio Lussu recalls it too, in the first chapter of Un anno sull'Altipiano: his brigade was sent to rest here, in what he calls a «small town, not far from the old frontiers». The name probably comes from the Latin agellum, little field — and indeed in the arms the eagle grips a sheaf of wheat — or else from sacellum, a small sacred place; the first certain record of the village is of the thirteenth of December 1202.

For some years now, though, Aiello has been known for another reason: it is the village of sundials. A group of enthusiasts has installed a great many of them on the walls of houses and public buildings, and by now people come on purpose to count them. The rest is a village of the plain with a good deal scattered about: the old centa, a fifteenth-century fortified complex made of the curate's house, the canipa — the food store — and the cemetery, where excavations in the early two thousands brought to light some thirty burials of an early medieval necropolis; the mills out in the open fields, among them the one at Novacco, recorded in documents more than a thousand years old; the parish church of Sant'Ulderico, in use since 1691, with the dome frescoed in 1900 by Clemente Delneri of Gorizia; the convent complex of San Domenico, begun in 1716. The hamlet of Joannis was an autonomous comune until 1927, and there was born Enzo Bearzot, who as a coach won the World Cup of 1982.