Manzano

On 29 July 1917, at a place called Sdricca, the first nucleus of Arditi was formed and trained: the first special forces of the Italian army. The town still remembers it, with a historical re-enactment held in the very field where it happened, on the last Sunday of July. Two years earlier, at Oleis, an airfield had been opened. Today, instead, Manzano is the main centre of what they call the chair triangle: an industrial district which produced a great part of all Italian chairs, and where one of the great Italian furniture firms has its seat.

On the hill of Rosazzo, tradition says, a hermit named Alemanno built a chapel about the year eight hundred; by the middle of the tenth century there was a convent of Augustinian canons, the monasterium rosarum; the church of San Pietro was consecrated in the eleventh century, and shortly afterwards the patriarch of Aquileia raised it to an abbey and settled it with Benedictines come from Millstatt, in Carinthia, where his brother was duke. The abbey grew rich, with lands in the Collio, in Istria and around Tarvisio, and in 1245 pope Innocent IV placed it directly under the Holy See. Its autonomy ended in 1391, when it was given in commendam to the archdiocese of Ravenna; a fire in the sixteenth century emptied it, the Dominicans came back into it, and from the nineteenth century it was the summer residence of the bishops of Udine. The earthquake of 1976 damaged it badly, and it was restored. In the hamlet of San Lorenzo stands the house where the writer Caterina Percoto was born.