Pozzuolo del Friuli

On the 29th and 30th of October 1917, the front having been broken at Caporetto, the Austro-Hungarians reinforced by German divisions were routing the Italian Second Army. Here, among the houses and alleys of Pozzuolo, a cavalry brigade made up of the Genova and Novara regiments and the Bergamo infantry brigade stood for two days against the Austro-Hungarian army. That stand allowed the Third Army to cross the Tagliamento and get away. It cost hundreds of dead and it struck the civilian population too, because the fighting was inside the town. Since 1959 the only cavalry brigade of the Italian army carries the name of Pozzuolo del Friuli, and every year it commemorates those two days.

Under the fields there is a great deal more. In the hamlet of Sammardenchia lies one of the largest Neolithic villages known, not only in this region but in Europe: the excavations, begun in 1985, have shown that they grew above all emmer and barley, that they kept animals and hunted, and above all that they traded, because the pottery carries decorations pointing to the Po valley culture of Fiorano, to eastern Veneto, to Piedmont, and further off to Dalmatia, the central Danube area and the Carpathians. At the place called Braida Roggia an area used for preparing food stayed in use for three centuries, until a particularly disastrous flood of the Cormor caused it to be abandoned; much later the same spot was reused as a burial ground. And on the two rises called the Cjastiei and the Culine stood the Bronze Age castellieri, whose fortification works can still be made out at their edges: there were workshops for metal and shops for bone and horn, in the houses they spun and wove, and there was a class of warriors who probably made their iron weapons themselves. The name Pozzuolo appears in a document only in 921, in a donation by the emperor Berengar; in those years the village was administered by the meeting of its heads of household.