Tricesimo

The name of this town is a distance: ad tricesimum lapidem, at the thirtieth milestone from the port of Aquileia, along the consular road that led to Julium Carnicum — today Zuglio — and to Noricum. Another village, Terzo, marks the third mile: the milestones have stayed in the names. Tricesimo appears for the first time in the Itinerarium Antonini, the Roman list of distances, in the forms Tricensimum and Tricesimum. From that one Latin word two names have grown, by two different roads. The Friulian one came by mouth: already in the early Middle Ages the i had become an e, giving Tresesem, which is the form of the first medieval record, of 1169; by the end of the fourteenth century it was Trasesin, and in 1440 Tresesin appears for the first time. The Italian one came by paper: from the thirteenth century the Latin documents go back to the classical form Tricesimum, and the first documents in Italian, of the fifteenth century, settle on Tricesimo. In the sixteenth century somebody even wrote Trigesimo, which puts the meaning back in the open: thirtieth.

Tricesimo was the head of a gastaldia with jurisdiction over thirty-three villages. The gastaldo, an officer of the patriarch of Aquileia, administered justice under the loggia of the comune and collected the taxes; the priest of the pieve, on the other hand, was elected by an assembly of representatives of every village. The town itself was run by the vicinia, the assembly of the householders who owned property: a pale form of communal autonomy, but concrete enough to have left us the Statutes of Tricesimo, a set of rules about the market, the passage of strangers and the crafts and farming. For all that, Tricesimo stayed among the minor comuni and never had a voice in the parliament. It was a knot of houses ringed by a wall with towers, and the duomo stood outside it: which did not stop the troops of the count of Gorizia from wrecking it in March 1289, nor the Turkish incursions of 1477 and 1499 from burning what stood outside the walls.