Pocenia

Two explanations run about the name of this village, and the second is merciless. The first brings it from Pulcinia, from the Latin personal name Pulcinius, and takes the origins back to Roman times, when a village of fishermen is said to have settled along the banks of the Stella. The second, more recent and in Friulian, brings it from puc e nuie, «little and nothing», for how few people lived here. The old name has stayed in the arms anyway, in a golden scroll that reads PULCINIA A. D. MCCLI; below it two fish swim in opposite directions, one on each of the two silver bands, alluding to the two rivers of the territory — perhaps with a nod to the dolphins in the arms of Daniele Dolfin, last patriarch of Aquileia and first archbishop of Udine. The rivers are the Stella, a spring-fed river that ends in an estuary in the lagoon of Marano, and the Torsa, which rises in the hamlet of the same name and reaches it after a few kilometres, right beside the main village.

Along via Stroppagallo coins of Augustus and amphorae have come to light, and people thought of a Roman road between Cividale and Aquileia; but the village lies far to the west of both, and the hypothesis hangs unresolved. After the invasions the area was abandoned, and became workable again only with the reclamations of the patriarchs; from the thirteenth century the feudal investitures arrived, and the town archive keeps the one for the mill of Torsa, of 1488. How little this place weighed is well said by a deed of 1822, when the Austrian administration recognised it as a comune of the third class: that is, a comune without an office of its own, dependent on Latisana, whose only assembly was the Convocato Generale of the landowners. At Rivalta, towards via Ariis, a rural hamlet remains with its church: nobody lives there any more.