Premariacco

On the arms of Premariacco, granted in 1986, there is a sword, and it is not an ornament: it stands there for Fiore dei Liberi, who was born in this comune around the middle of the fourteenth century and was a master of arms, the author of the oldest known treatise on fencing. Nor is he the only name the village has given to history. From here, probably from the hamlet of San Mauro and from the Saccavini family, came also Paulinus of Aquileia, patriarch, saint and one of the most authoritative scholars of the Carolingian renaissance. Two opposite ways of ending up in books, out of the same handful of houses: one wrote for the court of Charlemagne, the other set down how to hold a sword.

The village lies in the first belt of hills of eastern Friuli, and the river Natisone crosses it under a Roman bridge. In its hamlets one can read a piece of prehistory and of the early Middle Ages: at Firmano there is a hill fort of Roman or pre-Roman date, and there important Lombard remains have come to light; at Orsaria the church of Sant'Ulderico, of 1905, was built over what was probably another hill fort. At Ipplis the vine is intensively cultivated and the castle of Rocca Bernarda stands; at Azzano they have a small collector's peculiarity, since the hamlet belongs to the association of the Azzano of Italy, eleven comuni and hamlets that bear that name and whose inhabitants are all called azzanesi. Friulian is spoken here, in its central-eastern variety, and from the last decades of the twentieth century — above all after the earthquake of 1976 — a Slovene-speaking community has also grown, having come down to the plain from the Canal Valley and the Slavia friulana.