Dignano

In this village of middle Friuli, on the left bank of the Tagliamento, on the twenty-second of November 1789 was born the man who gave Friulian its dictionary. Jacopo Pirona was an abbé, and in Udine he did many things: he taught in and directed the gymnasium, was director of the civic museums, librarian of the civic library, provincial censor of publications and president of the city's Academy. But the work of his life is the Vocabolario friulano, compiled together with his nephew Giulio Andrea and published in Venice in 1871, the year after his death: it is considered the first dictionary of the Friulian language with a unified spelling, that is, the point at which a spoken language becomes a written one with rules. The nephew carried on: in 1935, with Ercole Carletti and Giovanni Battista Corgnali, he put together what everybody calls «the new Pirona», reprinted countless times since. The house where Jacopo was born is still standing.

The most important building in the village, though, is older than all of this: the pieve of Santi Pietro e Paolo, of the twelfth century, is one of the oldest in Friuli. The apse is frescoed with paintings of its own time, and in the left nave there are four frescoes of the eighteenth century. Of the eighteenth century too is the parish church of San Sebastiano. Then there is casa Pirona-Bisaro, of the sixteenth: a very rare example of a Carnic house in the middle of lowland Friuli, with a façade marked by four tufa arches and, inside, two large eighteenth-century frescoes. Here, alongside Italian, Friulian is spoken — the language of that dictionary — in its central-eastern variety.