Udine Geography & Climate

Udine sits in the middle of a plain, on the only high ground for some distance, and the region around it changes character very fast.

The hill

The castle mound rises about forty metres straight out of level ground. Whether it is natural, a reworked moraine, or artificial has been argued for centuries; the legend that Attila's soldiers built it with their helmets to watch Aquileia burn is at least a good story. The city grew in rings around it.

The high and low plain

Friuli's plain is split. The upper part, where Udine sits, is coarse gravel washed down from the Alps, through which rivers sink underground. A few kilometres south, at the spring line, that water comes back up in a belt of resurgences, and the lower plain is wet, green and full of small clear streams.

The mountains

North of the city the Julian and Carnic Alps rise quickly to well over 2,000 metres, and the Tarvisio corridor through them is the lowest crossing of the Alpine chain, which is why every army for two thousand years has used it.

The wine hills

East of Udine the ground lifts into the Colli Orientali and the Collio, marl and sandstone hills running to the Slovenian border, warmed by the plain and ventilated from the mountains.

The lagoon

Forty kilometres south the plain ends in the lagoon of Marano and Grado, and Aquileia, once a Roman city of a hundred thousand people, sits at its edge.

Earthquake country

The Alpine front here is seismically active and produced the destructive shock of 1976.

Udine has a humid continental climate and is one of the wettest cities in Italy, which surprises people who expect the Mediterranean.

Rainfall

The Friulian plain lies where moist air from the Adriatic runs into the wall of the Alps, and the result is exceptional. Annual totals well above 1,500 millimetres are normal here, and the mountain fringe north of the city is wetter still — among the wettest places in Europe.

Winter

Winter is cold and damp, with highs around 6°C, regular frost, and fog on the plain. Snow falls most years, sometimes heavily, and lies for days.

Spring

Spring is green and unsettled, warming quickly through April and May, and is the second-wettest season.

Summer

Summer is hot and humid, with highs above 30°C and heavy afternoon thunderstorms rolling off the Alps. Hail is a real agricultural risk here and the vineyards are netted against it.

Autumn

September and early October are the best weeks of the year — warm, clear, with the vintage under way in the hills to the east. Rain then increases sharply in November.

The bora reaches here too

Weakened by distance from the coast, the northeasterly still arrives in winter, and it is what clears the fog.

Between mountains and sea

Forty kilometres separate a plain that freezes in winter from a lagoon that almost never does, and the same distance again reaches snowfields that hold into June. Very few Italian cities sit in that much climatic range.

What to bring

A coat in winter and something waterproof in every other season; the rain here is not a formality.