Coseano

On the twenty-first and twenty-second of October 1866, the third war of independence over, the plebiscite by universal male suffrage was held to confirm the passage of the Veneto — which then included most of Friuli as well — to the Kingdom of Italy. Coseano is the village where the votes against were most numerous: two hundred and nineteen yes and twenty-five no. To see how much that number weighs: in the whole territory that today makes the provinces of Udine and Pordenone the no votes were thirty-six out of about a hundred and five thousand voters, and twenty-five of them were here. Since then the village is also called Coseàn dal no. The result was taken as a scandal and raised such bad feeling that the man held responsible, the parish priest don Antonio Riva, had to flee a lynching disguised as a carabiniere. What moved him is said by a letter of his of 1870, written when he was a retired parish priest: he defends the infallibility of the pope against his enemies. Austria was not his cause.

The comune itself is young: it was set up in 1818, detaching Coseano, Coseanetto and Maseriis from the comune of Dignano and Barazzetto, Cisterna and Nogaredo di Corno from that of Flaibano. It lies in the north-western part of the Friulian plain, between the Tagliamento and the Corno stream, on the last flat ground before the hills, between one hundred and one hundred and forty metres. On its arms, granted in 1941, there is a little temple of Janus on a green field. At Barazzetto excavations have brought to light Roman remains that go from the first century before Christ to the fourth or fifth after. The churches are San Giacomo and San Rocco at Coseano, San Bartolomeo at Coseanetto, San Biagio at Maseris — whose sixteenth-century frescoes were restored between 2007 and 2008 — and Sant'Andrea, out in the fields between Coseano and Barazzetto. Here, alongside Italian, Friulian is spoken.