Muzzana del Turgnano

The woods of Muzzana are what is left of the great lowland forest that Virgil and Pliny the Elder described as stretching from the Livenza to the Isonzo. More than three hundred hectares survive, oaks and hornbeams with the odd wild apple and pear, divided into two holdings: the bosco Baredi, which is the collective property of the village, and the Coda di Manin, private. Among the small marshes and the springs some four hundred species of fungi grow, and there is white truffle too; in 1998 a new species of shrew was classified in these woods, the Sorex arunchi. On the other side the territory goes down to the lagoon of Marano, where they still fish with the palmonâ: you get into shallow water, thirty centimetres will do, and feel gently for the flounders with your hands, standing up or leaning out over the edge of the batela.

The harshest memory of the village, though, belongs to 2 March 1514. During the siege of the hill of Osoppo, the imperial captain Cristoforo Frangipani had one hundred and thirty-four men of Muzzana blinded: the fifty-six oldest prisoners lost both eyes, the four youngest had the cross of Saint Andrew cut into their cheeks, the other seventy-four lost the right eye and the three fingers of the right hand, so that they could never take up arms again. The eyes were gathered in a basin and shown by the executioner to the besieged on the hill. Since then those men are «li Orbi de Mozana», the blind of Muzzana, and the village has given them a park; in the arms granted in 1963 the black is mourning, the red is blood, and the helmet pierced by arrows recalls that day. In 1950 the same fields were crossed by the Cormor struggles, the mobilisation of the unemployed labourers of the Friulian lowland.