Concordia Sagittaria

The second half of the name comes from an arrow factory. The town was founded in 42 before Christ as Iulia Concordia, at the point where the via Annia crossed the via Postumia, and for centuries it was called simply Concordia; the «Sagittaria» was added by a royal decree of 1868, in memory of the factory of sagittae, that is of arrows, set up here at the beginning of the fourth century and recorded in the Notitia dignitatum. That there were soldiers here is confirmed too by the burial ground on the left bank of the Lemene, of the fourth and fifth centuries, called the «sepolcreto dei militi» for the great number of inscriptions on its sarcophagi.

It is a place suspended between two regions. After the barbarian invasions Concordia entered the Lombard duchy of Cividale, then the March of Friuli and the patriarchal state of Aquileia; in 1420 it was annexed with the whole of Friuli to the Republic of Venice, and only in 1838 was it detached from the Patria del Friuli to pass to the province of Venice. The suspension has never quite ended: administratively it is Venetian, but the native inhabitants speak a dialect of the western Friulian type with Venetian influences and keep Friulian traditions. The Church too keeps it in a double condition: Concordia has never lost the dignity of a cathedral see, but the bishops have not lived here since 1586, when the Holy See moved them to Portogruaro and then, in 1974, to Pordenone. The cathedral of Santo Stefano is of 1466, and beneath it the foundations of the early Christian basilica have been found.