Faedis

At Faedis there are two castles, and the second was built lower than the first for a reason that is touching today: out of respect. The castle of Cucagna came into being after 1027, when the patriarch of Aquileia Poppo allowed the Carinthian nobleman Odorico di Auspergh to raise a stronghold; Odorico chose the hill of Cucagna, from which one dominated the Grivò valley and the road between Cividale and Gemona, and from the hill the family took its name. Two centuries later, with the permission of patriarch Berthold of 13 November 1248, the same Cucagna built a second castle, called Zucco — from zuc, hill — and placed it at a lower point, «almost a form of submission and respect» towards the first, older and more illustrious one. In the fifteenth century both were abandoned, because the nobles preferred the comfortable villas of the plain; Zucco was also burned by the Venetians, and in the sixteenth century both, with the attached comital titles, were bought by the Fullini family of Polcenigo.

The village's name comes from the Friulian faêt, that is a beech wood, from the Latin fagetum. In the cave Çondar des Paganis, on the boundary with Attimis, finds of about four thousand years ago have come to light, and the Romans left coins, a farm villa and perhaps a votive shrine where the church of Santa Maria Assunta now stands. Recent history, by contrast, is that of a borderland at war: in the summer of 1944 Faedis was part of the Free Zone of Eastern Friuli together with Attimis, Nimis, Lusevera, Taipana and Torreano, an experience closed at the end of September by the German counteroffensive, which burned houses, deported and killed. Between 1945 and 1959 seventeen hundred people left the comune. Then came the earthquake of 1976, which struck hard; for the way it rebuilt itself, Faedis received the gold medal for civil merit.