Artegna

The first written record of Artegna is in Paul the Deacon, who in the Historia Langobardorum names the castle of Artenia; the Latin toponym becomes Arthenea around the year one thousand and later Retenia. The village still has four names: the Friulian Dartigne, the German Ardingen and the Slovene Ratenj, which is still in use and comes from the Resian form Ratënj, itself descended from the late-antique Latin toponym. What it means is disputed: some take it from the Latin artus, narrow, for the narrows between the colle San Martino and monte Faêt, and some from a man called Artenius, perhaps the latinisation of a Celtic name built on the root art, bear, with an honorific suffix, hence «strong as a bear». The source, on the other hand, discards a third reading, widespread but without scientific foundation: arx plus nea, the new rock.

The history of Artegna lies between two earthquakes. The church of San Martino has the shape the people of Artegna gave it in the sixteenth century, when they repaired it after the earthquake of 1511 had wrecked it. On 6 May 1976 the earthquake of Friuli devastated the comune: the castle on the hill, rebuilt afterwards, is what remains of the fortress that held the summit until the fourteenth century, and the tower called the Lombard one belongs to the first building. But the earthquake also gave something back. In 1977, during the repairs, while the eighteenth-century altar of the little church of Santo Stefano was being removed, seven early medieval stone slabs came to light, which suggest a foundation at least Carolingian. That church stands above the borgo Clama, which takes its name from an old Artegna family; a church at Clama, then dedicated to San Leonardo, appears in the will of Federico di Prampero of 1281, and the dedication to Santo Stefano is documented from 1431. In the parish church of Santa Maria Nascente, of 1829, the ceiling was frescoed by Sebastiano Santi.