Majano

At nine in the evening of the sixth of May 1976 the Friuli earthquake devastated the comune; further shocks came in September, and in the whole region nine hundred and sixty-five people died. Majano is among the towns that were destroyed on a large scale. The parish church, of the seventeen hundreds, was so badly cracked that they pulled it down and built another in its place. The bell tower waited much longer: the new one was inaugurated on the sixth of May 2012, thirty-six years to the day, and it was raised using also a stump of the tower of 1906, the one people here called il biel tôr, the beautiful tower. Its three bells were cast at Innsbruck in 2011 and are hung to swing in the Friulian way; at the foot of the tower stands the old great bell, cast at Udine.

Before that there was something else. At San Salvatore a Lombard burial ground was discovered, and the rich grave goods of the warriors are now in the museums of Udine and Cividale. At San Tomaso, on the road that joined Concordia Sagittaria to the Noricum, in 1199 the knights of Saint John of Jerusalem — the ones who would become the knights of Malta — founded a hospital with its little church: the founding parchment is kept in the Joppi library in Udine. It stood on the Tagliamento stretch of the old via di Alemagna, the road that came down from the Baltic lands to the ports of the Adriatic, and it gave shelter and food to pilgrims travelling to Rome. At Susans there is a castle of ancient history, rebuilt in its present shape in the sixteen hundreds, and the parish church of Santo Stefano: a chapel is recorded there as early as the twelfth century, but the building you see is of the eighteen hundreds.