Pradamano

The name of Pradamano, of Latin derivation, means «nearby farm»: that is, it defines the place by its distance from something else, without saying from what. And the coat of arms, granted in 1968, stays in the same key, for it contains nothing heroic: there is a silver band, standing for the roads that link the territory to the neighbouring centres; there is a mountain, indicating the altitude; there is green, standing for the fertility of the soil; and there are three ears of wheat, for the productivity of farming. No castle, no saint, no lion: roads, earth and wheat. It is the coat of arms of a village that knows perfectly well what it does.

What came here from the city, on the other hand, are the villas. Villa Ottelio was built in 1785 as a summer residence; Villa Giacomelli is of 1852 and is a neoclassical work by Andrea Scala; and in the hamlet of Lovaria alone one counts villa Caimo-Dragoni, villa Piani of the eighteenth century, villa Merlo Dragoni and villa Giudici, the last from the early twentieth century. For a comune of this size they are a good many, and they say that the countryside here, at a certain point, became a place to come and spend the summer. The church of Santa Cecilia was built between 1779 and 1784 to a design by Luca Andrioli, while at Lovaria there is that of San Giovanni Battista. At Pradamano, beside Italian, Friulian is spoken, in its central-eastern variant, and the comune falls within the area where the language is protected.