Moruzzo

Moruzzo stands on the highest rise of the ring of hills that looks over the plain, and the finest thing it has is what you can see. From the main square, where a centuries-old lime tree once stood, to the north you make out the castle of Rive d'Arcano and the hills of Colloredo di Monte Albano, San Daniele and Tricesimo; to the west the castles of Fagagna and Villalta; to the south Udine with its urban area and the cultivated plain which on clear days reaches as far as the lagoon. The name, by comparison, is modest: it comes from the Latin murus with a diminutive suffix, «little wall», or else it is the Friulian plural of morùt, little walls. The place is very old: in 1897 a Celtic necropolis was found here, and it seems the boundary of the ager of Aquileia ran this way. The first document concerning this land speaks of three brothers of Lombard stock who gave their properties to the monasteries of Salt di Povoletto and Sesto al Reghena, among them the vineyard of Grobanges, which is today's Santa Margherita del Gruagno; the diploma of Otto II of 983 confirms to the patriarch of Aquileia the castles of Buja, Fagagna, Udine, Brazzacco and Gruagno; and the name Moruzzo appears for the first time in 1161.

The castles here took a beating. The Lower one of Brazzacco was burnt in 1309 and again in 1511, the year of the Crudel Joibe Grasse, the peasant revolt in which the castle of Moruzzo too was sacked, like those of half of Friuli: of it there remain the tower of Sant'Andrea, the little church and the old parish house. The castle of Brazzacco di Sopra is better preserved, and in its walls of large squared stones one recognises a typical feudal keep of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Scattered in the fields and on the hilltops are the votive chapels: Santa Eurosia, of 1400, San Michele the archangel on the hill of that name, the Santissima Trinità, of 1600, built at the wish of Giovanni Manin as a family chapel. In recent decades many well-off people from Udine have built their villas up here, turning part of the territory into a genteel residential belt: in the statistics Moruzzo comes out as the comune with the richest taxpayers in the province.