Bagnaria Arsa

At Sevegliano, where the town hall stands today, the Romans settled immediately after the founding of Aquileia, at the crossing between the road coming from Codroipo and the one climbing from Aquileia towards Noricum. What remains are not walls but objects, and they tell how people lived: fine table pottery, local and imported; a grey ceramic vessel with an inscription in Venetic, the language Latin would later replace; a rare milk boiler, which proves that flocks passed through; a small bread oven; black-glaze lamps for lighting, wine amphorae and thin-walled cups. To drain the wet ground they used amphorae, burying them: that drainage has survived better than the buildings. Of a small temple only the terracotta elements that protected the wooden beams remain, and in a brick well beside the road a dagger was found, probably belonging to some passing legionary.

From the Middle Ages, on the other hand, there survives a document worth a whole village: a census of 1375 which lists, village by village, the name of every inhabitant, their age and their trade. From it one understands how they lived: modest houses with a straw roof and a wide yard, and a rent to be paid to the nobles or to the church in wheat, millet, oats, rye and wine, or else in hens and eggs. Self-government lay in the vicinia, the assembly of the heads of families; the degano and the jurors — roughly the mayor and the council — were, however, appointed directly by the Strassoldo, except at Bagnaria. And between one village and the next ran a very concrete rivalry: in 1536 the people of Palmada and those of Sevegliano came to blows. In the woods, judging by the place names, one might also meet the wolf.