Remanzacco

In the eighteen hundreds pellagra was eating this countryside. On the eighth of May 1883 the heads of the households met and, with a grant from the state and behind the mayor — who was the village doctor, Carlo Ferro — and the parish priest, don Pietro Braidotti, founded the Rural Oven: a bakery belonging to everyone, to the village. It began working on the first of January 1885, the second in Friuli after the one at Pasian di Prato. The name of the place is far older: it comes from a Roman estate name, that is from the name of the owner of a holding, and the church of Santo Stefano stands where a legionary probably received his allotment of land. Remanzacco appears for the first time in a document of 1192, a bull recognising the rights of the chapter of Cividale over the churches that had existed for at least forty years.

Then came the railway from Udine to Cividale, which crosses the town. On the twenty-second of November 1938 two arches of its bridge over the Torre gave way as a passenger train was going over it: the locomotive and three carriages fell into the torrent, eighteen passengers and three railwaymen died, fifteen people were injured, and a soldier who had come to give first aid drowned. Older wounds: on the first of August 1509, in the fields of Orzano, the Venetians came off worst against an Austrian detachment that was besieging Cividale. And in the parish church, in a chapel made out of the antechamber of the sacristy, stands the wooden altar that had been for more than four centuries in the little late-Gothic church by the cemetery: a polyptych of two tiers with ten carved statues and six smaller ones, painted and gilded, attributed to Giovanni Martini together with Antonio Tironi, one of the most important pieces of Friulian woodcarving of the early Renaissance.