How Was Cividale del Friuli Built

Cividale is a small town with a very high concentration of things built by people who mattered.

The Tempietto

A single vaulted room of the eighth century, with a stucco arch over the entrance wall carrying six female saints, over a metre tall, modelled with a delicacy nobody expected of the period. The wooden choir stalls below are fourteenth-century. It stands on the edge of the gorge and is reached through a convent.

The Ratchis altar

A stone altar carved around 740 for Duke Ratchis, later king, with a Christ in Majesty, a Visitation and an Adoration cut in flat relief. The figures are stylised, frontal and enormously alive, and the altar is one of the key objects of early medieval European art.

The bridge

Built in the fifteenth century on a natural rock in mid-stream, blown up by the retreating Italian army in 1917, and rebuilt afterwards to the same design. It is twenty-two metres above the water at its highest.

The duomo

Begun in the fifteenth century, finished in the sixteenth after a collapse, with a silver altarpiece of the twelfth century inside.

The Palladian palace

The archaeological museum occupies a sixteenth-century palace attributed to Palladio, which in Friuli is a rarity worth noting.

The walls

Venetian-period walls still ring most of the old town, pierced by gates that carry the lion of Saint Mark, and the stretch above the gorge needed no wall at all.

Under the town

The soft conglomerate has been cut into for cellars and chambers for two thousand years, and the Ipogeo Celtico — Celtic, Roman, Lombard prison, nobody agrees — is the strangest of them.