Meduna di Livenza

Castle and village appear for the first time in 1223, in a quarrel between the patriarch of Aquileia and the abbot of Sesto al Reghena over who had jurisdiction here. The patriarch won, and the sentence turned into a contract: the inhabitants were required to see to the defence of the territory and of the castle, and in exchange they were granted the right to sell wine and bread in the tavern inside the walls. Meduna was a feudo di abitanza, which means that whoever administered it was obliged to live in the castle, not to send a deputy there; the first family to do so was called, not by chance, Meduna. With the coming of Venice the fief passed to a branch of the Michiel patricians, who were for that reason nicknamed «dalla Meduna»: of the castle only service rooms were left, and the centre of the town became palazzo Michiel — today the town hall — where the chancery, the court and the militia sat.

Meduna is Friuli by history and by geography, and it was Friuli politically too until the Napoleonic age; it is the only comune of the province of Treviso lying entirely on the left bank of the Livenza, and its churches depended on the patriarch, and then on the archbishop of Udine, until 1923. In 1881 somebody proposed to suppress the comune and join it to Motta di Livenza: the attempt was stopped by a lively popular protest organised by one Giorgio Prosdocimo, and for several years the town remembered it with a feast. Perhaps from that day comes the motto «Meduna la boje», Meduna is boiling, which states the temper of its people. The parish church of San Giovanni Battista, consecrated in 1545, stands exactly where the castle stood, and is of brick, with a gabled front and a spired belltower; inside it keeps two works attributed to Jacopo Tintoretto, commissioned by the Michiel.