Cassacco

Cassacco is known for its early medieval castle, the Cassimberg, and for its four frazioni, which all stand on a hill above the Friulian plain: Conoglano, Martinazzo, Montegnacco and Raspano. The parish church of San Giovanni Battista goes back to the thirteenth century, and the bell tower, of 1926, was designed on the model of the one at Lucca cathedral. At Raspano the first written record is of the year one thousand, and it says that the community «in temporal and in spiritual matters is subject to the Chapter of Aquileia»; in the fifteenth century Raspano appears as a comune of first investiture, but the religious jurisdiction was already Cassacco's, and its inhabitants spent centuries asking for a parish of their own: one of those petitions was sent to the Doge of Venice on 19 January 1792.

In 1976 the Friuli earthquake struck hard here too, and Cassacco rebuilt itself so well that in 2002 the comune received the gold medal for civil merit, as an example of civic valour and sense of duty; the municipal arms, for that matter, were granted in that very 1976. At Raspano, close as it was to the epicentre, the damage was contained: few buildings fell, among them the presbytery and the school, and the council has put up commemorative plaques over them in Friulian, which is the language spoken here beside Italian. The village keeps two older memories as well: the memorial to the dead of the First World War, with its twenty-two names, which some accounts hold to be the first built in Friuli; and the fire of 1944, when the Wehrmacht's reprisal against the local partisans threatened to burn the whole village and in the end burned a single house, that of the family of Luigi Antonio Tami. The bell tower of San Marco, at Raspano, designed by Arduino Berlam and paid for with the villagers' offerings, was inaugurated on 3 February 1952.