Pasian di Prato

From the middle of the sixteenth century the village governed itself through the vicinia, the assembly of the heads of households, which every two years elected a decano; and that office has left its mark, because Degano is today the commonest surname in the comune. The assembly answered directly to the Venetian lieutenant who sat at Udine, and it lasted until 1797. That the office counted for something could be seen earlier too: in the war between Venice and Austria the chronicles record a prisoner taken in a fight near Remanzacco on the first of August 1509, Bertossius son of Michael, decano of Pasian di Prato, and four hundred ducats were asked for his ransom. The source reads that figure as a measure: he must have been a rather wealthy decano.

The name comes from a Roman, one Pacilius who held land here, and it appears for the first time in a document kept at Vienna and drawn up between 1076 and 1084, recording the donation of certain goods by a count of Gorizia. Passons, the other hamlet, takes its name from the Latin for pasture: in Friulian people still say lâ a passòn, to go to pasture, and the final s is a plural, so that Passons means pastures. Its first document is the record of a survey of the fields between Colugna and the Cormôr, ordered by the chapter of Aquileia on the ninth of December 1244; among those present is Adalprettus de Passono, the first inhabitant of the place of whom we have a certain name. On the thirty-first of January 1885, on the bank of the same stream, twelve skeletons were found, each with a dagger at its side: not Roman burials, the scholars said, but of the barbarian age. Between the houses lie the prati stabili, the meadows that are never ploughed, here the only ones in the region, which the comune has put on its arms in the form of an oak.