San Giorgio di Nogaro

From February 1916 until the retreat after Caporetto, San Giorgio di Nogaro was the seat of the Università Castrense, that is of a field medical school. Students of the conscription classes enrolled in the fifth and sixth year of medicine came here from universities all over Italy, and here they took their degrees: lectures and practice were held in temporary structures and in buildings adapted to the purpose, because the front was a step away. Twelve hundred doctors graduated, and from San Giorgio they left for the battlefields, where they were needed more and more. Elena of Orléans, who helped to found it, stayed at Villa Dora between 1916 and 1917; and in the council chamber of the town hall there is still a plaque for the many of those young men who died in the war. In 1926 the fallen too got their monument, a bronze by Aurelio Mistruzzi in front of the town hall: a fighter resting after victory, but with his eyes watchful for every new threat.

Two kilometres further south is Porto Nogaro, which takes ships of up to seven thousand tons and disputes with Monfalcone, by less than half a nautical mile, the title of northernmost commercial port of the Mediterranean. Here, after all, it has always been a matter of borders: the Roman via Annia passed through, and along it the four oldest nuclei took shape — Chiarisacco, Zuccola, Borgo di Sopra, Zellina; at the Diet of Worms, in 1521, San Giorgio was ceded with other Friulian villages to Austria; and after the Third War of Independence it became a frontier comune, with the trade that followed. In the spring of 1795 an epidemic nobody could name tripled the number of deaths compared with the years before: a women's monastery in Venice had a statue of the Virgin made and gave it to the town, the citizens made their vow, and when the epidemic was over the statue was placed on the altar — and it still goes out in procession with songs handed down by heart. In August 1950, near Porto Nogaro, the Villaggio Giuliano was inaugurated, built for thirty-two families who had left Istria and Dalmatia.