Povoletto

In 922 the emperor Berengar gave leave to strengthen and fortify the castle of the Motta, on the eastern spur of the hill of Savorgnano. That fief was worth more than it looked, because from there one controlled the intake of the roggie, the canals that ran off towards the city of Udine: and holding a city's water in your hand made the Savorgnan what the sources call the lords of the water. Older still is the monastery of Salt. A deed of 762 tells that three rich Lombard brothers, Erfo, Anto and Marco, sons of duke Pietro of Friuli — the same men who founded the abbey of Sesto al Reghena — assigned the houses of Siacco and Magredis and other goods to a Benedictine foundation on the bank of the Torre, where their mother Piltrude had withdrawn. That house had the favour of the last Lombard kings and then of Charlemagne and Louis the Pious. And then, for reasons nobody knows, towards 888 the nuns left it: they moved to the monastery of Santa Maria in Valle at Cividale, taking with them few possessions, the relics of six saints, and the body of Piltrude.

In the little church of San Pietro at Magredis, a small fifteenth-century building with a bell-gable, the presbytery has a cycle of frescoes that Gian Paolo Thanner painted in 1529; and lower down, along the base of the wall, there are twelve panels from the century before with the months of the year — a calendar of what the peasants did in Friuli, month by month. Povoletto was burnt by the Turks in the second half of the fifteenth century, and it followed the fortunes of the Serenissima for as long as the Serenissima lasted. In 1944 a battle was fought here that ended with the taking of the town hall, which was the last building the nazi-fascists still held; the Garibaldi and the Osoppo brigades were in it. The earthquake of 1976 did great damage. And that earthquake also changed who lives here. Until the seventeen hundreds, according to the testimony of father Gaetano Sturolo, the frazioni of Savorgnano and Ravosa were inhabited mostly by people whose mother tongue was Slav, and then that speech slowly fell out of use in favour of the Romance one; but in the last decades of the twentieth century a Slovene minority came back to live here, because after the earthquake the people of the Valcanale and of the Slavia friulana came down into the plain. In the early seventies a geographer put the Slovene-mother-tongue share of this comune at two in a thousand; a government estimate, ten years later, put it at five in a hundred. Alongside Italian, what is spoken here is Friulian, in its central-eastern variety.