Tarcento

In a single year the town was struck twice. In 1511 Tarcento was one of the epicentres of the Friulian revolt of Fat Thursday, the peasant rising in which the castles and noble houses of the area were burned and the nobles tortured and killed; and in the same year a ruinous earthquake arrived. The castle above the village had already had a complicated life: on the hill of Coia there were two of them, the upper one dedicated to San Lorenzo and the lower one, and when in 1352 the lower was demolished and then rebuilt, it was made using material recovered from the upper, which had meanwhile been destroyed in its turn. Today nothing remains of the castle of San Lorenzo, and a tower of the lower one still looks down on the town; on the sixth of January, on that hill, they light the pignarûl grant, the great bonfire to which Celtic origins are attributed.

Tarcento is a hinge: to the north the Julian Pre-Alps, to the south the upper Friulian plain, to the east the eastern hills, to the west the moraine amphitheatre of the Tagliamento. And it has for neighbours the Musi mountains, one of the rainiest areas in Europe and the rainiest in Italy, which work as a basin and keep the clouds pressed against the valley. From 1356 the community governed itself by an assembly of the heads of households, the vicinìa, whose rules were approved by the castle's magistrate; the assembly lasted until the sixteen hundreds, when it gave way to a council of twelve members, later grown to thirty. Between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth the town became a fashionable holiday place — the Belle Époque villas with their parks, the silk mills, the dam of Crosis, the tramway that came up from Udine — and they called it the pearl of Friuli. Then came the earthquake of 1976, and after a partial rebuilding of the historic buildings the summer visitors and much of that economy did not return.