Mortegliano

The Cormor crosses the built-up area, and at first sight it looks like a spring-fed river, with a perennial flow and a water temperature that hardly changes; in fact it comes down from the slopes of the morainic amphitheatre, fed by the rain that falls on the hills, and along the whole high plain its bed is nearly dry for most of the year, except when it rains hard. A pamphlet of 1899 records the nickname people had given it, and that nickname is the name: runs and dies — corre e muore — whence Cormor. And yet on the twentieth of September 1920 that stream, once past the narrows of Pozzuolo, opened out like a fan and submerged Santa Maria di Sclaunicco, Lestizza, Talmassons and Flumignano. Moving it has been necessary more than once: in 1543 the roggia of Pozzuolo was canalised, and by guaranteeing a steady supply of water it made it possible to irrigate the fields. The plots are marked out by rows of mulberries — morâr — which once fed the silkworms, and the fields are maize, and have been for centuries.

The name is Roman, from a Murtelius who was probably an early colonist here, and the first time the place appears in a document is in 1247, as Mortellanum, among the pievi subject to taxation by the patriarch of Aquileia. Long before that, when invasions and epidemics had emptied the countryside, the patriarchs had done something worth knowing about: to repopulate these fields they resorted to forced immigrations of Slav peoples, sometimes founding new settlements — the nearby comune of Basiliano was one of them, and kept the memory of it in its name, Pasian Schiavonesco, until 1923. At Mortegliano the newcomers left a quarter instead: the Borc Sclavs, along what is now via Marconi, where between the twelfth and the thirteenth century the families come from the Slav lands gathered. In 1309, in the struggle between the count of Gorizia and the patriarch, armed bands led by a Slav count, Giovanni Babanic, the count of Gorizia's brother-in-law, entered the village, sacked it, burned it and took it — and that was the only event of any weight in the whole Gorizian invasion, which had nevertheless made the patriarch Ottobono flee from Udine towards Bologna. The ferocity used at Mortegliano was judged so dangerous that Ottobono hurried to make terms with the count of Gorizia the very next year. On the slightly raised ground of what is now piazza San Paolo there was a church; it was demolished in 1490 to make room for a larger one, and that one was demolished in 1864 to make room for the duomo that stands there now — and beside the duomo stands the bell tower, a hundred and thirteen metres high, the tallest in Italy.