San Michele al Tagliamento

On 19 May 1944 the Allied bombing, aimed at the bridges over the Tagliamento, razed the town to the ground. After the war San Michele was not rebuilt where it had stood: they built it again a little further south, with wide straight streets, and the place where the old centre had been is today called San Michele Vecchio, with a memorial where the church once stood. In that bombing the sixteenth-century villa Mocenigo-Biaggini-Ivancich was also destroyed, where Adriana Ivancich lived and where Ernest Hemingway and Ezra Pound were guests for a time: its ruins remain, among them two barchesse by Baldassarre Longhena, and the great park.

Wars have passed through these parts more than once. In the municipal cemetery there is a war cemetery holding the bodies of more than 400 Austro-Hungarian dead of the First World War, when the retreat from Caporetto also carried away the two bridges over the river. And at the end of the nineteen-sixties the comune became the site of the southernmost of the fortifications built along the Tagliamento embankments — the only one in the Veneto — which stayed in service until 1991: the bunker near the bridge is now restored and can be visited. It is the easternmost comune of the Veneto, and indeed here, alongside Italian, Friulian is spoken, recognised and protected as a historic language of the place.