Campoformido

The name of the town appears for the first time in a minute of 14 July 1231, and the phrase has ended up on the arms: «actum in prato de Campoformio feliciter», done in the field of Campoformio, happily. The minute is that of the Parliament of the Patria del Friuli, one of the oldest in the world, which met here too and here held the review of its army. Beside those words, on the arms, there is a pair of scales, standing for the justice administered by the patriarch of Aquileia. Earlier still, in Lombard times, Campoformido was one of the places appointed for the monomachie: judicial duels that served to establish whose the fault was and so to close a quarrel. They were fought in the meadows of San Canciano, in a quadrangular area still called the Tomba forata.

In 1797 Napoleon Bonaparte and four representatives of the Habsburgs signed here the treaty that gave Veneto to Austria in exchange for Lombardy and closed the history of the Republic of Venice. It was signed in the house of a merchant, Bertrando Del Torre, in what is now called piazza del Trattato; the two plaques that recall it, one outside and one inside the house, stayed covered with lime for a long time after Napoleon's fall. A month earlier Joséphine de Beauharnais had joined her husband at Villa Manin; bored, she often went to Udine for the balls, and one day, stopping at Campoformido to rest, she lost a ring. Nobody has ever found it, and the saying has stayed: go and hoe the earth, maybe you will find Joséphine's ring. Then came the aeroplanes. On the eve of the First World War the air force laid out three fields here and later made Campoformido one of its permanent bases: and here the first aerobatic patrol was born, the ancestor of the Frecce Tricolori. The three griffin's legs on the arms are there to recall it.