Arta Terme

Arta stands at four hundred and forty metres in the Val Bût, in Carnia, and has always lived on a bad smell. The water of the Pudia spring carries hydrogen sulphide, that is, it stinks of rotten eggs, and it was the Roman colonists of Julium Carnicum who christened it: aqua putens, stinking water, from which the name Pudia. They already used it. The first written document naming these baths is of the fifteenth century; the first chemical analysis, in 1811, confirmed the presence of free hydrogen sulphide; and in 1870 Giovanni Pellegrini opened the first thermal establishment. From then on Arta became what it is: a spa and therapeutic centre, one of the few in the Friulian mountains.

On the nineteenth of July 1885 Giosuè Carducci arrived in the village and stayed almost a month at the Albergo Poldo. Carnia inspired several poems in him, and among them is «Il comune rustico», which imagines the assembly of an alpine village of centuries before: the poet had come for the waters and carried away an idea of the mountains. The churches of the comune are many and old: the little church of Santo Spirito, of the fourteenth century, that of San Nicolò, of the fifteenth, the parish church of San Martino at Rivalpo Valle, also of the fifteenth, the archpriest's church of Piano d'Arta, of 1781, and the parish church of Santi Ermacora e Fortunato in the main village. Here, alongside Italian, the Carnic variety of Friulian is spoken. In more recent times Arta was for years the summer training camp of Udinese and twice the finish of a stage of the Giro d'Italia.