Lignano Sabbiadoro

Until 1959 Lignano was a hamlet of Latisana. Before the Venetians came, eight people lived on the point, and the Roman road was never paved nor passable by carts: to bring a cart you had to cross the whole lagoon on rafts. The Chronicon Altinate, which is of the twelfth century, calls the place the Litus Lugunanus and explains the name by the great quantity of wolves, but that is a false etymology; more probably it is the name of somebody's estate, from a personal name hard to identify. About the second half of the name, on the other hand, everything is known: Sabbiadoro, golden sand, is a modern invention, which began to circulate in the early nineteen hundreds along with the bathing trade — some credit d'Annunzio with the coining — and was made official in 1935, for promotion, when the tourist board was set up. The first bathing establishment is of 1903, but until the marshes were drained malaria held everything back; the first road to Latisana is of 1926.

In 1953 the architect Marcello D'Olivo drew as a spiral the street plan of what would become Lignano Pineta: the snail is the symbol of the town and ended up in the coat of arms, together with the gold of the beach and the blue of the sea. A comune of its own since 1959, in 1972 it gave itself the Terrazza a Mare by Aldo Bernardis, which takes up the idea of the Sydney opera house. There is also a church that was carried here bodily: Santa Maria del Mare, of the fifteenth century, stood at Bevazzana on the banks of the Tagliamento, and between 1965 and the year after it was taken apart and rebuilt in the pinewood to save it from a flood of the river; inside there are frescoes in praise of the Virgin and a stone altar that turned up during the move, which had belonged to a far older oratory standing where the church once was. Giorgio Scerbanenco spent his last years here and set several novels in the place.