Bertiolo

In the oldest documents the name appears as Bratiul, Bratiol, Bretiul, before settling into the form it has today. The village lies on the Stradalta, that is on the old Roman road that led towards Illyricum, and along a road like that everything has passed: between the end of the ninth century and the middle of the tenth the Hungarian raids were so frequent that the road was called strata hungarorum, the road of the Hungarians. The answer were the cortine, and here there were two: an inner one, raised and walled around the church and the graveyard, where people really did shut themselves in, and an outer one made of a ditch round the houses. From the fields ploughed over the old grasslands Roman traces have come up more than once, and the legions are thought to have had permanent camps in the area.

The oldest church of the territory is the little church of the Holy Trinity, probably built on the ruins of a small Roman temple dedicated to the Celtic god Belenus. The documents name it from the sixteenth century, but the bell above its front carries the date 1287 and is the oldest in the whole province; and the works of 1989 brought to light a small temple of the seventh century and a Lombard necropolis attached to it. Not far off is the sanctuary of the Blessed Virgin of Screncis, born according to tradition from a shepherd who in a hollow of the ground saw a half-hidden image of the Madonna: they carried it to the parish church and the next day it was back there, they carried it to the Trinity and it happened again. A dig of 1857 in that hollow found many human bones, perhaps the dead of one of the many battles of Friuli. On the pediment, since 1918, stands the appeal to the Regina pacis, the queen of peace.