Buja

In 1976 the Friuli earthquake devastated Buja. The pieve of San Lorenzo, which stands on the highest of the town's seven hills, was restored — and during those works, in 1980, the traces of an ancient early Christian basilica came to light beneath it, of the kind built in the Aquileian country in the fifth century. Inside the same church there are ten Gothic frescoes with the Stories of the Virgin: it is the largest Marian cycle in Friuli. The duomo of Santo Stefano, on the other hand, lost everything but its facade and its bell tower, and was put back up where it was and as it was. And the town library carries a name that is a date: 6 di Mai dal '76, the day of the earthquake.

A twelfth-century copy of an older document tells that Buja was given by Charlemagne to the patriarch of Aquileia. In 1371 the patriarch Marquard of Randeck granted the place a communal statute of its own, with a council of twenty-four members which every year elected a mayor from among themselves. On the arms there is an ox walking on three green hills and holding a purple pennant with a white cross. And in the church called ad Melotum — that is, at the apple tree — there is a wooden Madonna and Child, carved by Domenico da Tolmezzo in 1481, and two paintings showing the Virgin above an apple tree: because the legend says she appeared there, on one.