Montenars

Montenars lies in the basin of the Orvenco stream, closed to the north by Monte Cuarnan, in country so little disturbed that one may meet roe deer, foxes and now and then a bear. There are two explanations of the name: the obvious one derives it from montanarius, the mountain dweller; but some prefer to make something of the ending -ars, the same as in Gonars, Beivars and Ruttars, which would point to a Lombard arimannia, a settlement of free armed men — a mountain one, as against that of Artegna down in the plain.

In the hamlet of Flaipano they spoke Slovene, in the local variety called po nasen, and the censuses record how it died out: in 1901, at Flaipano, 112 families out of 115 had Slovene as their mother tongue; in 1911 it was still thirty per cent of the families in the whole comune, ten years later half that, in 1983 about a quarter of the population, and today the sources consider it practically extinct. The date the village does not forget, however, is 1976: the epicentre of the Friuli earthquake was close by, and at Montenars thirty-five people died.