Cervignano del Friuli

In April 340, just outside the Roman settlement of Cervinianum, the emperor Constantine II fell into an ambush laid by his brother Constans's army, and died there. The name of the place, however, has nothing to do with that story nor with deer: it is an estate name, that is it comes from the name of the Roman owner of the holding, a Cervenius or Cervonius, with the ending that marks possession. In the records it appears from 912 as Cerveniana, and over the following centuries it wavers between Cervignano, Cervignana, Cervegnano and Cervegnana; the specification «del Friuli» came only with a decree of 1923, to avoid confusion with Cervignano d'Adda. Meanwhile, though, the misunderstanding with the deer had taken hold, and on the communal coat of arms the deer is there: half the shield tells a mistake, and the other half, with the anchor, recalls something true, the river port on the Ausa.

That river has twice been a state frontier. From the sixteenth century onwards it separated the Austrian possessions from the Venetian ones, and the border ran through the town itself, exactly where the port and the only bridge stood: some hamlets of today's comune remained Venetian while the town centre was imperial. Then, from 1866 until the First World War, the same Ausa marked the international border between the Austro-Hungarian empire and the Kingdom of Italy. In August 1914 Austrian conscription called up the men of this place too: they had to report within two days at Trieste, they were framed into the ninety-seventh regiment, they received uniforms and a minimum of formal training, and on the eleventh of August they left by train for Galicia, where a rifle was handed to them for the first time. On the twenty-third of August they were sent to the front line: more than seventy per cent of them died.