Porpetto

The first lord of the place is known by the name he took from the castle: Volrico of Caporiacco, whom an imperial document of 1186, in the time of Barbarossa, already calls «de Porpeto». He must have counted for a good deal, if the emperor Frederick II wrote to him asking him to intercede in his favour with the patriarch of Aquileia, and if on 17 February 1221 he declared him and his sons free feudatories. The castle, though, had a very hard life. It was razed to the ground by order of the patriarch Nicholas of Luxembourg, who wanted to avenge the murder of his predecessor Bertrand, killed in 1350 in the fields of San Giorgio della Richinvelda: the lord of Castelporpetto, accused of taking part in the conspiracy of the counts of Gorizia, was beheaded. Rebuilt in 1386, the manor burned in the imperial assaults of 1509, was retaken by the Venetians in 1514 and in the same year set on fire again.

The end, however, did not come from a siege. Around 1617 it was the Venetians who took the stronghold apart, and its stones ended up in the bastions of the fortress of Palmanova, which they were raising a few kilometres away. Of that stronghold nothing stands today, but it is the one the comune still carries in its arms, red and guelph-crenellated, with two crossed swords above. The lords of the place, the di Castello afterwards known as counts Frangipane, moved into the villa built at the end of the seventeenth century in the spot that is still called Castello. The village, where Friulian is spoken, has meanwhile invented a contest all of its own: every July the districts challenge each other in the torneo dai Borcs, on a concrete pitch in the parish grounds, with narrow, elongated goals that look like no others.