Until 1923 this comune was called Pasian Schiavonesco. The second word came from an old Slav colony — schiavona, from the Friulian sclavòn — settled here in the Middle Ages; and in the nationalist climate of those years it was decided to cancel the original toponym, and the place became Basiliano. The same thing was happening, in the same year, at the other end of the region, where Dolina was turned into San Dorligo della Valle. What the ground says is older: there are traces of hunters and gatherers of the Palaeolithic, Neolithic farming communities whose pottery and stone tools have come up on the hill of San Leonardo, and on that same hill a castelliere of the Iron Age. On the top of it stands the country church of San Leonardo; the present building is of the fifteen hundreds and its frescoes are of 1529. Around it the comune is a ring of small villages, each with its own church: the parish church of Variano was raised about 1190, the country church of Sant'Orsola at Villaorba in 1338, that of San Pietro at Orgnano in the second half of the fourteen hundreds.
Basiliano has a railway station, and it has had one since 1860; between 1915 and 1919 Vittorio Emanuele III used it too, to reach the front, which was not far, and a marble plaque on the front of the passenger building still records it. After Caporetto the comune was occupied by the Austrians. In the second war it found itself inside the Adriatic Coastal Operations Zone, which meant being administered directly by German civil and military authority, and the Resistance fought that here. The monument to the fallen of the two wars, in the square before the town hall, is the work of a sculptor from Basiliano, Aurelio Mistruzzi. In two of the frazioni the comune also lists among its monuments a red bench, in memory of women who are victims of violence. After the war the population grew again and then began to fall in the years of the economic miracle, when the building was going on elsewhere. Here, alongside Italian, people speak Friulian. And in October, at Villaorba, in the middle of the Friulian plain, they hold a crab festival.
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📅 Every year, on 30 November; mid-March brings the Fieste dai ucei at Blessano
Basiliano celebrates Saint Andrew the Apostle on 30 November. In mid-March, in the hamlet of Blessano, the «Fieste dai ucei» bird fair is held.
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The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
