Buttrio

The bell tower of Buttrio imitates that of San Marco in Venice, but it has a peculiarity that Venice does not: the clock face was mounted upside down, with the twelve at the bottom and the six at the top, and it appears to be the only such case in Italy. The tower's history explains how one arrives at such a thing. The first bell tower stood on the opposite side from today's and was pulled down; work on the new one began in 1828, the clock was built between 1836 and 1837 by Domenico Bosco of Medea, and the three new bells arrived in 1840, when the belfry was completed. On top they put a temporary covering, replaced in 1843 by another temporary covering: and that second provisional roof stayed there until 1936, when at last the drum, the pyramid and the spire were made. Just under a century of temporary roof.

The name comes from a pre-Roman word meaning ravine, chasm, and the village appears for the first time in the year one thousand as Butrium; in a treaty of 1362 between the patriarch of Aquileia and Rudolf IV of Habsburg a German name, Humberg, also seems to appear. Of the castle it is known that in 1306 it was stormed by the patriarchate and then destroyed by the men of Udine, Gemona and Cividale, who wanted to stop the ambitions of the counts of Gorizia; in 1415 the lords of Buttrio were finally deposed. Then there is an episode worth telling in full: in 1477 the terror of the Turks spread, but the serious damage the village suffered came from the allied mercenary troops, not from the enemy; the Turks did arrive twenty-two years later, in 1499, and sacked it. The comune came into being in 1811. In the First World War Buttrio was a rear-line town, full of field hospitals, and after Caporetto it was occupied, with many of its citizens deported; after the Second it housed for a dozen years the Collegio dei Mutilatini, which took in about a hundred children injured or maimed by exploding war remnants. Today it is a town of wine, and the Danieli group has its seat here.