San Giovanni al Natisone

This is one of the corners of what they call the Chair Triangle, the industrial district that has made this area one of the densest furniture-making poles in Italy. The town is named for the first time in a document of 1070, when the patriarch Enrico gave it to the abbey of Rosazzo, but remains have come to light in the fields that make it exist already in Roman times, on the road that led from Aquileia to Cividale; and it was probably here, in 610, that the Lombard duke Gisulf clashed with the Avars who then sacked Cividale and half of Friuli. At Medeuzza, in June 1915, an airfield was opened which stayed in use until Caporetto and housed the command of the artillery aviation group with its five squadrons; in December thirty Austrian guns shelled it and the squadrons had to move.

Friulian is spoken here, but not only that. After the earthquake of 1976 many people came down to the plain from the Valcanale and the Slavia friulana, and so a Slovene-speaking community formed: in 1971 it was less than three per cent of the inhabitants, in the eighties a government estimate put it at about a tenth, later studies between five and ten per cent. Today more than one resident in eight is a foreigner, and the largest community is the Chinese one, followed by Romanians and Tunisians. Then there is the station, which deserves a line: it is the only one in all Friuli-Venezia Giulia staffed by a movements officer still equipped with a lever-worked electric interlocking, and it works perfectly to this day.