Cividale del Friuli Culture

Cividale is a small Italian town sitting on a cultural fault line and entirely at ease with it.

The Lombard inheritance

The town takes its early medieval history seriously, and rightly: the stucco figures of the Tempietto and the Ratchis altar are the best surviving evidence of what Lombard art actually looked like, and they come from a period usually described in terms of what was lost.

Three languages

Italian is the everyday language, Friulian is widely spoken and officially recognised, and the valleys east of the town speak Slovene dialects that have been there since the early Middle Ages. Signs in the valleys are in three languages and nobody finds it odd.

Mittelfest

Since 1991 the town has run a summer festival of theatre, music and dance drawn from central Europe, founded in the year Yugoslavia broke up and explicitly intended as a meeting point. It is a serious festival in a very small place.

Wine

The Colli Orientali del Friuli begin at the edge of town and produce friulano, ribolla gialla, picolit and the red schioppettino, which was almost extinct in the 1970s and was brought back by a handful of growers here.

Gubana

The sweet of the Natisone valleys is a coiled yeast pastry filled with walnuts, raisins, pine nuts and spirit, eaten in slices with a glass of grappa poured over it. It is Slovene and Friulian at the same time and is made properly in perhaps a dozen kitchens here.

The devil's bridge

The legend says the devil built it overnight in exchange for the first soul to cross, and the townspeople sent a dog. The same story is told across Europe; the people here tell it better.