Udine Culture

Friuli is not a variant of the Veneto, and Udine will make that clear without being asked.

Furlan

Friulian is a Rhaeto-Romance language, related to Ladin and Romansh rather than descended from Venetian, with something like half a million speakers, a literary tradition, and legal recognition. Street signs are bilingual, the local paper carries it, and hearing it spoken is the quickest way to understand that you are not in Italy's north-east so much as in Friuli.

Tiepolo

Between about 1726 and 1729 a Venetian painter in his early thirties was given three commissions here and produced the work that made his reputation. The patriarch's gallery, the staircase, the cathedral chapels and the Oratorio della Purità are all within a short walk and are almost never crowded.

Food and wine

San Daniele ham is cured twenty-five kilometres northwest; Montasio cheese comes from the Carnic alps; frico, a fried cheese and potato cake, is the regional dish. The whites of the Collio and the Colli Orientali — friulano, ribolla gialla, picolit — are among the best in Italy.

The tajut

The local ritual is a small glass of wine taken standing, several times, across several bars, in the early evening. It is social rather than alcoholic and it is how the city works.

Caravaggio in the castle

The civic gallery holds a Caravaggio and a good collection of Venetian painting, which in a city this size is a reminder that Udine was a capital rather than a market town.

Pasolini

Pier Paolo Pasolini spent the war years in Friuli and wrote his first poems in Friulian, which the region has never forgotten.