Zuglio is the ancient Iulium Carnicum, the northernmost Roman town in Italy: it began as a vicus in the middle of the first century before Christ and became a colony under the empire, and of its forum there still remain the limestone paving, the portico, the civil basilica and the temple. Its importance came from the via Iulia Augusta, which climbed from here to the pass of Monte Croce Carnico and led into Noricum. Some of the finest finds — the bronze inscriptions for the official Gaius Baebius Atticus, the portraits set within a shield — are now in the museum of Cividale.
Between the fourth and the eighth centuries Zuglio was a bishop's see, with jurisdiction over Carnia and Cadore. Then things went badly: after an Avar raid the town was abandoned in 705, bishop Fidentius moved the see to Cividale, and in 740, at the death of bishop Amator, the diocese was suppressed and absorbed into the patriarchate of Aquileia. And yet that dead diocese kept the right to a cathedral chapter of its own until the Napoleonic age: more than a thousand years of formal survival. Of its religious history there remains the pieve of San Pietro in Carnia, three kilometres from the village, one of the oldest churches in Friuli. In recent times Zuglio has also been through an administrative turn common in these parts: abolished in 1932 and attached to Arta, it was restored in 1946.
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📅 Every year, on 6 November
On 6 November Zuglio celebrates its patron Saint Leonard of Noblac; the town stands on the site of ancient Iulium Carnicum, with its Roman forum and archaeological museum.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
