Tolmezzo

Around the year 1400 the town was closed in by walls with eighteen towers, and the list of their names has survived entire. There were the tower of the Upper Gate and that of the Lower Gate, the tower of the Fountain, the one above the millrace, the tower of the School, that of the Parish Priest, that of the Hermitage; and then the towers that bore the name of a family — Modesti, del Degan, Reitembergher, Pianesi, Agustini, Giacomo Cosse, Nicolò Vuruz, Andrea Alessi. Outside the circuit stood two more, among them the perched Picotta. A ditch ran round the walls and over everything loomed the castle of the patriarchs. That wall, in short, was also a register of who lived here.

Tolmezzo stands where the seven valleys of Carnia meet, on the road the Romans had already opened towards Austria through the pass of Monte Croce Carnico; in 1356 a patriarch made it the capital of Carnia, dividing the territory into four quarters, and in August 1392 another patriarch raised it to the head of the whole territory and granted it a new ensign: a blue field, a white cross edged with red. That is still the flag borne in the town's gonfalone. In the seventeen hundreds the textile works of Jacopo Linussio gave work to hundreds of people from Tolmezzo and from the valleys nearby. In the school year 1906-1907 the second class of the elementary school in the hamlet of Caneva had as its master Benito Mussolini. Then, on the sixth of May and the fifteenth of September 1976, the earthquakes: much of what came down was old, and had passed unharmed through two world wars. The centre was rebuilt from scratch to antiseismic rules, and the town holds the gold medal for civil merit for the disaster and the silver medal for military valour for the partisan struggle.