Sedegliano

Fortified Bronze Age villages are very rare on the plain: in the whole of Friuli three are known, the one at Sedegliano, the one at Savalons in Mereto di Tomba and the one at Galleriano in Lestizza. And of these three only Sedegliano keeps its defensive circuit almost entire: an earth embankment more than twenty metres wide and about three metres and a half high, which still runs around what was the settlement. The University of Udine carried out three excavation campaigns here between 2004 and 2006, and out of them came an exceptional discovery: four inhumation graves inside the village. For protohistoric Friuli it is the first time burials have been found inside a settlement, and they are the oldest that can be attributed to the people of the castellieri: until then, of those populations, their houses and their defences were known, but not their dead.

In the hamlet of Coderno was born father David Maria Turoldo, poet, antifascist and theologian, one of those priests who left their mark more with words than with pulpits. At Redenzicco stands the small church of San Giovanni Battista, with fourteenth-century frescoes that are worth the detour; there remain also the mill of Rivis and the little fort of San Lorenzo. The village used to have a carnival famous throughout the Triveneto, the Carneval da l'Orcul, with floats and masked groups and more than one thousand five hundred participants parading through the streets and the great central square. Today it is no longer held, and in its place a group of young people organise the fieste in latterie, a small feast in the second week of September inside the village's former dairy: dishes cooked on the spot and people together. A village that traded a carnival of fifteen hundred people for a party in the old dairy: this too is an honest way of telling the last fifty years of the Friulian plain.