Ragogna

Monte di Ragogna is an isolated hill that reaches 512 metres and looks down on the Tagliamento. Between 30 October and 3 November 1917, during the retreat from Caporetto, that hill served to buy time: the Special Army Corps, hastily formed on 26 and 27 October and deployed along the middle Tagliamento, had the task of slowing the Austro-German advance just enough for the rest of the Italian army to settle on the line of the Piave. The defence on the mountain worked, and the Piave front — which would shortly become the new front line — had time to take shape. On the mountain remain the emplacements, the paths of the Great War and the Las Cengles supply mule track, built by the army before the conflict to feed the positions along the northern slope, sheer above the river. Today, on the same summit, there is a radio astronomy observatory.

The hill, however, had been doing that job long before. The oldest name is Reunia, which appears already in Venantius Fortunatus in the sixth century and in Paul the Deacon in the eighth, and which scholars link to the presence of the river; in Roman times the Castrum Reuniae stood here, guarding the road that led towards Noricum, and in Lombard times the fortress served as a refuge for the population during the Avar invasions — around 695 it was from here that the nobleman Ansfrid set out to usurp the duchy of Friuli. In 1218 the fief passed to the von Wallenstein of Carinthia, who changed their surname to Ragogna and made themselves a name, not an honourable one, through operations of brigandage, until in 1365 the patriarch of Aquileia stormed the castle and sent them elsewhere. The earthquake of 1511 and the fire of 1560 did the rest: at the end of the eighteenth century the site was abandoned and given to the comune.