Pagnacco

Pagnacco is a Roman farm that became a comune. In the oldest documents the place appears as praedium Paniacum, the property of Panio, and out of that came Paniaco and then the name it has now. Before the Romans there were the Celts and the Carni, who settled in this country between the sixth and the fifth century before Christ. The comune is made of the capoluogo and six small places — Castellerio, Fontanabona, Lazzacco, Modoletto, Plaino and Zampis — a few kilometres north-west of Udine. Its churches are the parish church of San Giorgio, the sanctuary of the Madonna della Tavella and, at Zampis, the church of San Giacomo. Here, alongside Italian, people speak Friulian, and since a regional deliberation of 2001 the comune has been inside the territory where that language is protected.

What Pagnacco has chosen to keep is not a palace but the working life of the people who laboured on that Roman farm and on the ones that came after it. At Fontanabona, inside a group of buildings that carries a declaration of historical and architectural interest, there is an ethnographic museum of peasant history: about two thousand objects of material culture, from the seventeen hundreds to the early nineteen hundreds. They are the tools and the things of the peasant and artisan history of this region, and in particular of central Friuli, of the valleys of the Natisone and of lower Carnia — three countries that in those centuries lived very differently from one another. The section that is worth the visit on its own is the one on spinning and cloth. The comune's own arms, by contrast, are recent: they were granted in 1975.