With events
Sagre and feste in Friuli-Venezia Giulia
16 towns
Each town page lists what happens there and the month it happens in, with the source. Always check with the town before you travel.
Udine
Province: Udine · 113 m
The historic capital of Friuli, built around a man-made castle hill.
Cormons
Province: Gorizia · 51 m
The capital of the Collio wine zone at the foot of the Friulian-Slovenian hills.
Trieste
Province: Trieste · 2 m
The Adriatic port the Habsburgs built as their window on the sea, an Italian regional capital still arguing in four languages on the Slovenian border.
Fagagna
Province: Udine · 177 m
A 177-meter Friulian hill town northwest of Udine, fortified by Otto II in 983 and racing donkeys in the piazza since 1891.
Polcenigo
Province: Pordenone · 40 m
A 40-meter village at the foot of the Carnic Prealps where the Livenza rises, neighbour to the UNESCO Palù pile-dwelling site occupied since 4900 BC.
San Vito al Tagliamento
Province: Pordenone · 30 m
A medieval Tagliamento-plain town inside three rings of moats and three towers.
Spilimbergo
Province: Pordenone · 132 m
A 132-meter Friulian town on the Tagliamento, home since 1922 to the Scuola Mosaicisti.
Aquileia
Province: Udine · 5 m
A village of 3,128 on a Roman capital of 100,000, where the largest paleochristian mosaic floor in the West runs under a Romanesque basilica.
Cividale del Friuli
Province: Udine · 138 m
The Lombard capital on the Natisone, founded as Forum Iulii by Julius Caesar, where an eighth-century chapel still holds six stucco saints.
Cordovado
Province: Pordenone · 15 m
A 15-meter Friulian village in the Pordenone plain, fortified by the bishops of Concordia as their summer seat and described in Ippolito Nievo's Confessions.
Gorizia
Province: Gorizia · 84 m
Border city below the Julian Alps, split from its neighbor by a 1947 wall and rejoined only after decades of division.
Marano Lagunare
Province: Udine · 2 m
A fishing town on its own pastel-coloured harbour, with a working fleet, an Aquileian Venetian past, and a still-strict dialect of its own.
Muggia
Province: Trieste · 13 m
The only town on the Istrian peninsula still inside Italy, a small Venetian port on the Gulf of Trieste five kilometers from the Slovenian border.
Palmanova
Province: Udine · 26 m
A nine-pointed Venetian star fortress on the Friuli plain, its geometry closed three centuries after it began.
San Daniele del Friuli
Province: Udine · 252 m
Italy's prosciutto capital, a 7,900-resident hill town in the Friuli morainic amphitheatre where the Tagliamento valley's south winds meet the alpine downdraughts, producing the San Daniele DOP raw-cured ham (31 producers, 14-month minimum cure) and where Pellegrino da San Daniele's 1497–1522 frescoes inside Sant'Antonio Abate are the regional Renaissance set-piece.
Sauris
Province: Udine · 1,212 m
A 1,212-meter German-speaking island in the Carnic Alps, second-highest commune in Friuli, where Tyrolean settlers founded the village around the thirteenth century.
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From elsewhere in Italy
Five more towns to discover
Giano dell'Umbria
Province: Perugia
A hill commune between Foligno, Spoleto and Todi, anchored by a Romanesque abbey built over the tomb of a fourth-century martyr.
Assisi
Province: Perugia
A pink limestone town at 424 meters on the western flank of a mountain above the plain, the birthplace of Francis and a UNESCO site since 2000.
Servigliano
Province: Fermo
An eighteenth-century ideal city at 215 meters in the Tenna valley, rebuilt by papal commission on a 137-by-144-meter quadrangle after the old hill village collapsed.
Labro
Province: Rieti
A 355-person stone borgo at 628 meters, restored since the 1960s by a Belgian architect and his descendants.
San Nicola Arcella
Province: Cosenza
A cliff village above the Tyrrhenian Riviera dei Cedri, where a sea arch fronts a cove only reachable on foot or by boat.