Santa Maria la Longa

The name of this village is made in layers. Until the year 900 the place was called Meleretum, that is «place of the apple trees»; between 900 and 1150 it appears as Villa Sclavorum, the village of the Slavs; in the middle of the twelfth century Santa Maria arrives, when the church of the Assumption was probably built; in 1250 «Longa» is added, which does not mean long: it comes from the Slovene logu, which means wood. The present form was fixed in 1780. The comune is made of five villages in the plain between Udine and Palmanova, in a fertile countryside where in past centuries some noble families built themselves the villas one still sees: Caimo Mauroner, Strassoldo Agricola Del Torso, di Colloredo Mels, Turchetti-Vintani, Bearzi. The hamlet of Tissano was destroyed by the Turks in 1477, and in the nineteen-fifties a Lombard cemetery was found there. Through the villages runs the Brentana canal, whose course was diverted into today's one around 1750; beside the old medieval square the pillory column still stands.

But it is 1917 that left the deepest marks here, and there are two of them, opposite. On the twenty-sixth of January of that year Giuseppe Ungaretti, who was in the area with his regiment, wrote in this village two lines only: «M'illumino d'immenso», I fill with the light of the immense. The poem is called Mattina, and today a monument recalls it. Six months later, in the same village, the two regiments of the Catanzaro brigade were resting after months in the trenches; the news that they would go straight back to the line set off a protest that on the night of the fifteenth of July became open revolt, with shots fired, and went on into the early hours of the sixteenth. The commander ordered the execution of four soldiers caught with their rifle barrels still hot and the decimation of one company. In 2011, in the centre of the village, a stele was unveiled in memory of the brigade.