Latisana

For two centuries Latisana was not a town but a port, and it behaved like one. The name Porto di Latisana appears in a document of the twenty-seventh of October 1226, when the count of Gorizia ceded to the patriarch of Aquileia the rights and revenues of the landing place. Through here passed the salt coming up from Cervia and the Ravenna country towards the interior and Istria, the timber coming down from Carnia for Venice, the grain, the wine, the minerals, the cattle and the travellers bound for northern Europe. Thirteenth-century documents call it a civitas, and there was even a bushel measured «to the measure of Latisana». In 1245 the community and the count of Gorizia gave themselves a statute of the Land and the Port, with civil, criminal and financial provisions, and that pact was ratified at Verona by the emperor Frederick II in person. The counts also granted the right to strike coin: the bowl-shaped denaro of Latisana, bearing the Gorizia symbols and the words Porto Tisana, of which seven specimens are known today.

That people passed this way much earlier we know thanks to a travel diary. In 333 a pilgrim from Aquitaine bound for Jerusalem noted down every stage and every distance in Roman miles, and along the via Annia, nine miles from Concordia, he marked a horse-changing station called Apicilia: it should be here, and what confirms it are the finds that came out of the digging for the water tower, among them a small jug full of ashes. Of Roman bridges over the Tagliamento, on the other hand, none has ever been found: people crossed by ford or by boat. One locality of the comune, Isola Picchi, lies on the far bank and can be reached only from the Veneto. In the cathedral there is a Baptism of Jesus painted by Paolo Veronese; the historic centre, though, is gone, destroyed by the bombing of the nineteenth of May 1944.