Paularo

The name comes from pabolarium, the pasture, or from poulars, the place of the horse chestnuts: and in piazza Julia the centuries-old horse chestnuts still stand, heirs of a plantation once far wider. An old parchment writes «Poularij di Incaroj, anno 1471». The village lies at the bottom of the Incarojo valley, in eastern Carnia, shut in by mountains above two thousand metres and open only through the passes: and it was for the passes that people often fought here. In 705 there were clashes between Lombards and Slavs on the mountains of the valley; on 30 August 1478 the battle of Lanza was fought against the Turks, who were seriously aiming at the Carnic valleys.

The written memory of all this, though, was lost in a single night: on 24 December 1709 a fire destroyed the archive of the then comune of Villa di Mezzo, today Villamezzo, where the documents that reconstructed the whole history of the valley were kept. What is known of the earlier centuries comes from deeds held in the archives of the neighbouring valleys, and stays fragmentary. In the eighteenth century Jacopo Linussio, born here and trained at Villach, opened dozens of textile workshops in Carnia and gave work as had never happened before. Of the border, instead, a stone marker remains at Valbertat Bassa: it carries the carved date of 1777, on one face the lion of Saint Mark and on the other the arms of the duchy of Carinthia. After Venice came Austria, the Napoleonic kingdom, Austria again, and at last Italy in 1866.