Rigolato

In the hamlet of Gracco there is an old beechwood still called bosco bandito, the forbidden wood. The name comes from the time of Venice: the Republic needed timber for its ships, and in Carnia certain forests were marked out and closed to local people. Here they also speak a Friulian of their own, the riguladot, which keeps the old vowel ending in o where today's Friulian has an e: and so the villages here are called Gjiviano, Vuezos and Ludario, not as the map writes them.

Rigolato used to be a chief town: of a canton under Napoleon, then of a district under Austria, a district that in 1863 was merged into that of Tolmezzo. Since then the village has only grown smaller, and from the nineteen-fifties the depopulation has never stopped. At Vuezzis, in the fourteenth-century chapel of San Nicolò frescoed with the saint's life, a bell still hangs that escaped the requisitions of the Great War: it was cast by a Venetian, Marco di Vendramo, whose name appears in a will of 1397.