Tavagnacco

The names of this comune are a Roman land register still in people's mouths. Tavagnacco, Adegliacco, Cavalicco are estate names, that is names formed on that of the colonist who owned the holding, with the endings in acco and icco typical of Friuli; and Colugna comes straight from colonia. It is no accident: right here ran the boundary between the ager of Aquileia, the colony from which the Romanisation of the region set out, and that of Iulium Carnicum, where the Celtic presence was strong. Far earlier still, in an area to the south-east, more than twenty thousand artefacts of local flint and quartzite have been gathered, covering an enormous span, from the Upper Palaeolithic to the Copper Age. And in a document of 762 three brothers, Erfo, Marco and Xanto, give to a nunnery some houses situated «in Adeliaco».

For centuries, though, these villages had no single master: Tavagnacco belonged to the noble d'Attimis, Branco to a branch of the Ettorei, the rest was divided between the gastaldia of Tricesimo and the captaincy of Udine. In the seventeenth century Venice put the free feudal jurisdictions up for sale and the mosaic grew denser still: Colugna was bought in 1600 by a private man and passed then to the future counts of Colugna, Adegliacco went to a lord of Feltre, Cavalicco to a count Florio; and Branco ended up administered by a lieutenant because the Ettorei had never legalised their noble investiture. After 1866 two separate and very different comuni were born: Feletto, of workers and artisans, with a progressive political life, and Tavagnacco, agricultural. In 1928 Feletto was aggregated to Tavagnacco, but the town hall stayed there: the comune bears the name of one village and has its seat in another.