Lestizza

The names of this comune tell of a repopulation. Between the end of the ninth century and the middle of the tenth the Hungarian raids emptied the Friulian plain, and to put people back on it Slav colonists were called in: the place names of Lestizza and Sclaunicco still say so, for they carry the mark of that origin. Everything else had come before: the castelliere «Las rives» near Galleriano, a settlement of huts defended by palisades and earthworks, and then the Romans, with some thirty archaeological sites scattered over the territory, the little bronze statue of Mars found at Paluzzana and now in the museum of Udine, the Cossetti necropolis at Nespoledo and, at Sclaunicco, about twenty burials used from the first century before Christ to the seventh after, with Lombard material among them too. The first mentions of the villages come in the patriarchal age: Villacaccia is villa Chazil in 1145, the possession of a German noble, and appears beside Lastiza in a document of 1174; Santa Maria and Sclaunicco in 1255, Galleriano ten years later, Nespoledo in 1302. Against the Turks they defended themselves with the walled enclosures around the churches and with watchtowers, which here were called toresses.

The community governed itself through the vicinia, which elected its own degano, and those were hard centuries: tenants always in debt to their landlords, epidemics of people and of animals, very high infant mortality. Against the cattle epidemics worked the physician Agostino Pagani, from Sclaunicco. In 1866, when Friuli passed to Italy, in this comune fewer than five inhabitants in a hundred could read; and the new eastern border, which cut across fields and roads, was judged fictitious and irregular to the point that Riccardo Fabris, born here, devoted an entire book to it. In the early twentieth century the cooperatives and the dairies were founded — that of Sclaunicco in 1911 — but people went on leaving, even across the ocean, and the emigrants had to come back at the outbreak of the Great War to go to the front. After Caporetto there was fighting at Sclaunicco, at Galleriano and at Villacaccia, and Nespoledo came close to being burned; then came the Spanish flu and the flood of the Cormôr in 1920. At the beginning of the fascist era, in 1922, the councillor Ludovico De Giorgio was murdered.