Nimis

In ancient times the village was called Nemas, and the name comes from a Celtic root — Nem, the sacred enclosure, or Nim, the wood — which in either case leads to the same image: a consecrated wood. Paul the Deacon lists the castrum Nemas among the Lombard places of Friuli, and here Arnefrit was killed, the son of duke Lupus, who was trying to take back the duchy with Slav help. The digs carried out in 1964 under the floor of the church of Saints Gervasius and Protasius brought to light a first basilica datable to the middle of the sixth century: the same century in which Slav populations began to settle on the nearby mountains, entering thereby the jurisdiction of the pieve of Nimis, which reached over Attimis and Povoletto as well.

Those mountain communities, though, felt neglected, and from the sixteenth century on they took the pieve to court because nobody really cared for the souls up above. They won: in 1642 they obtained the erection of the Vicariate of the Slavs, seated at Torlano and entrusted to a priest who knew their dialects and said mass in the little mountain churches. The vicariate lasted until 1885, when the new local parishes made it superfluous. Torlano returns in the history of the village on a far darker day: on 24 August 1944 the Waffen SS killed thirty-three civilians there, among them women and children, and the file of the investigation was hidden away, to be found again only in 1994 in the so-called cupboard of shame. The earthquake of 1976 devastated the built-up area, which has been rebuilt; on the hills they go on making Ramandolo, the sweet wine that was the first docg of Friuli.