Mittelfest inhabits its Mittelland between Cividale del Friuli and the Natisone and Torre Valleys. Discovering Mittelfest means entering a living cartography, where trees, walls, meadows, animals and people take the place of a fascinating thicket of voices and names.
Discover our Mittelland with Promo Turismo FVG.
“I don’t know how many Italians know Cividale, the most beautiful city in Friuli, which retains the Lombard imprint more than Pavia, with its labyrinthine streets. And few, a part from the mainly foreign scholars, know the wonderful and wonderfully ordered museum; excavated sculptures, jewellery, crosses, barbarian fabrics, mosaics, illuminated codices. And the Lombard temple with its prodigious stuccoworks on the Natisone gorge. I would have liked to hear the remainder of the Aquileian chant, an Epistle and a Gospel. It predates, I am told, Gregorian chant, and was used in Aquileia when all the churches had their own chant, before the Latin chant standardised them. It was lost in Aquileia, but the Messa dello Spadone (Mass of the Broadsword) of Cividale has handed down the last remnants of it. It is the famous Mass of the night of the Epiphany. A deacon in a plumed helmet, clutching an ancient Gospel book to his breast with his left hand, faces the people and draws the Cross in the air with a large steel sword; his appearance is repeated six times”.
Guido Piovene, Viaggio in Italia, Milano, Mondadori, 1957.
“The traveller who in the past took the road from Cividale to the east on horseback, in a carriage or on foot, could soon see that a different language from that of Friuli was spoken in this area. After crossing the stone bridge in Muost, Ponte San Quirino, and passing the gorge carved by the Natisone, the traveller entered the region that the geographers of the Venetian Republic called Schiavonia (Slaveland). These mountainous lands with green slopes, tending upwards towards the rocky peaks in the background, represented, according to the chronicles that reached the palaces of Venice, the decidedly wild edges of the civilised world. In these narrow valleys, along the rivers and streams, as well as on the tops of the mountains, in their stone villages, surrounded by wide pastures, amidst their cows, goats and sheep, lived the mountain people speaking their Slavic language. Although they had been Christians since ancient times, their language and customs, superstition and poverty made them quite different from the majority of the inhabitants of the illustrious and opulent Republic of Venice”.
Drago Jančar, Appunti dalla Schiavonia_Zapiski iz Schiavonie, edited by Michele Obit, translation by Ivana Placer, Topolò, Stazione di Topolò, 2008.
“The carriage road that from the Torre valley winds up for a good mile, after crossing one half of the village, to give way to the other, crosses the Cornapo, over a bridge, which for its solid and picturesque boldness could have been erected by angels, just like that of Cividale by the devil, but beyond the water, and just past the castle, the carriage road disappears in a ruin of landslides, gravels, and bushes; and thence many paths depart to their various chores, some of which plunge back into the stream where the wash-house and the fountain are; others climb the splintered flanks of the cliff, as in search of the goats that meet them in the evening at the whistle of the trampling; and the bravest goes directly into the gorge of the Cornapo, and at times bending to bargain with it until it cuts its bed, at others escaping it slender and dangerous through the folds of the coast, at others circling some chestnut thicket, goes up to supply the shepherd’s cottages on the mountain with foodstuffs from the plains”.
Ippolito Nievo, Il conte pecorajo, Milano, Vallardi, 1857.
