Gemona del Friuli

Between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Gemona grew rich thanks to a law that obliged other people to stop. It was called the Niederlech, that is unloading, and it was in force under the patriarchate of Aquileia: merchants passing through had to deposit their goods, pay a duty and spend the night in the town. It was not an invitation, it was an obligation, and it worked because there were no alternative roads: the plain below was ruled by the marshes of the Tagliamento, and whoever went from the Adriatic to the north-eastern Alpine passes had to come this way. Paul the Deacon, telling of the Lombards, already described it in 611 as an impregnable castle; in 1184 the emperor Frederick Barbarossa granted the town the charter of its market. With those compulsory transits came the churches, the noble houses and a circuit of walls protected by the castle.

The historic centre stands on a fan, that is on the spread of debris left by the partial collapse of Monte Chiampon in prehistoric times: the town is built on the rubble of a mountain. In 1976 the Friuli earthquake struck it very hard, and the fourteenth-century bell tower, standing tall beside the cathedral, was almost completely destroyed and then rebuilt on the same spot. The name too has a long story: a nineteenth-century hypothesis derived it from a supposed Latin Claudia Emona, but the studies of Giovanni Battista Pellegrini established the late Latin form Glemona, already in Paul the Deacon, which would come from the Celtic glem, height — first the mountain behind, then the fortress, then the town — with a suffix of Illyrian origin. In Friulian it is still Glemone, in Slovene Gumin. The specification «del Friuli» arrived instead by royal decree in 1935.