Pavia di Udine

Pavia di Udine is a scattered comune: the town hall does not stand in the place that gives the comune its name, but in the frazione of Lauzacco. And it is scattered in another sense too — it is a sequence of small settlements, and in each of them there is a villa. At Pavia there are villa Mantica-Frangipane, villa Lovaria and villa Porcia; at Cortello villa Caiselli-Carlutti, which people here call the villa of the sundials; at Lauzacco villa Beretta; at Percoto, besides the medieval Colombare house of the fifteenth century, there are villa Frattina-Caiselli, villa Keckler and villa Pozzo; at Persereano villa Florio-Maseri; at Risano villa Agricola-Pighin; at Ronchi villa Della Porta. Thirteen villas for a comune of five thousand people.

The place is Roman in origin and has seen all the peoples that crossed these lands go by. The first written attestation of Pavia and of Percoto is of 1135: the two villages were under the jurisdiction of the pieve of Buttrio, and together with the pieve they were given by the patriarch Pellegrino di Ortenburg to the abbey of Rosazzo. The rest of the territory stayed with the patriarchate of Aquileia, and in 1166 the patriarch Vodalrico assigned the village of Persereano to Enrico di Manzano. The comune, in short, before being a comune was three different properties. Here, alongside Italian, people speak Friulian — the central-eastern variety — and the comune lies inside the territory where the language is protected. Standing right next to Udine and to its industrial zone, Pavia grew for decades in factories and houses; then the world economic crisis closed many of the wood-working plants, and the pandemic did the rest, and a good part of what had been gained was lost.