Mereto di Tomba

There are two things in the name of this village: apples and a tomb. Mereto is the contracted form of Melereto, the place where apple trees are grown, and it appears that way already at the end of the fifteenth century; then the documents start writing Mereti tumbae, because meanwhile an ancient mound had come to light. That mound, which here they call the Tùmbare, has been dug by researchers of the University of Udine, and in 2008, in the last campaign, under the earthwork appeared the whole skeleton of an important figure who lived at the beginning of the second millennium before Christ. Not far off ran the Roman road linking Concordia to Noricum, a short cut for those who did not want to go round by the Annia and the Julia Augusta: in 2006 the chance finding of a stone funerary urn revealed the necropolis that flanked it, and some stretches of the road can still be walked.

Recent history, instead, is the history of those who left. From 1878, when the surveys on the movement of population began in Italy, until 1958, emigration emptied these houses in three waves: before the Great War, between the wars and after the second. Those who had gone tried to remake the village where they found themselves — they held the same feasts on the same days, helped the latest arrivals to find work, and collected money to send home for the band or for the works in the church. At San Marco that world is painted on the walls of the houses, in the murals of Gianni Di Lena, with the trades and the toil of the time. Industry came after the war, and the first factory to open the way, in 1949, was called Dinamite.