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Italian generals are notoriously phenomenal with the pen, but when it comes to taking up the gun, so to speak, the plot thickens. Thus, if in the autumn of 1918 the Allies had not pointed out to them that, since the Austrians were in canvas trousers, perhaps it was time to go and take the lands they theoretically coveted, they would have calmly remained on this side of the Piave, and Friuli would still be – well, perhaps what has remained all in all, a region whose location Italians, despite their irredentist great-grandfathers and irredentist great-grandfathers, know approximately – towards the Veneto, but a little further – and which in two out of three cases stress the wrong vowel. Better this way, but that doesn’t mean it will last. We are playing Venezia Giulia, yes – since the large ships disembark in Trieste, Piazza Unità d’Italia at various times of the day resembles the pier of Positano on Sundays in August. But internal Friuli is still another world. Rather exotic.
I abandon myself to these thoughtful reflections with the Tagliamento that reaches my knees – and he doesn’t know how grateful I am for it, the external temperature being higher than that hitherto considered compatible with life on Earth. Poor Tagliamento. In his time he had a couple of weeks of glory, when the above-mentioned generals, moving away from Caporetto at the speed with which Voyager moves away from the Sun, proclaimed that the foreigner would never cross its shores; only to then clarify, with the stranger already dry on the bank on this side, that they had been misunderstood: they had said Tagliamento, true, but they meant the Piave. Out of the limelight, however, the Tagliamento continued to flow, and still does today. The water is transparent, the pebbles white, the mountains in the background are light blue, like the air: and up there, since the area is protected, large birds of prey circle. Even though it is mid-August, there is no one in sight, apart from a couple of faded umbrellas in the distance. About fifty meters away, however, a group of very vintage day trippers, tattoos aside, have set up a barbecue hut and a couple of speakers for music. The girls look after the sausages, the boys have found a large smooth rock, from where they drift into a puddle with one of the first cross bikes to appear in Italy, in the contradictory seventies. It is a scene that could take place in a bend of the Don, in the enchanted years between the end of the Soviet Union and what came after, when the immense country enjoyed a momentary, and yet very spectacular, suspension of history. After all, everything here – in Friuli, not on the Don – has a strange relationship with time. To put it in a dirty word, it’s slightly uchronic.
Reluctantly taking our feet out of the water and getting back in the car, we follow the brown signs for Colloredo di Monte Albano, about ten kilometers away. The countryside is very green and apparently uninhabited, like Colloredo and its castle, still as they are described by their most illustrious citizen. For those who were not there, or were asleep, the Confessions of an Italian were written here, in the castle of Colloredo – aka, of Fratta. The huge conglomeration of towers, walls and so on came down in 1976, and has been under restoration ever since, so it cannot be visited. But you can stand at the entrance and look at the artificial straight line with ups and downs, aligned with the door, which cuts through the countryside. From that point it is quite easy to understand that Italia Nievo dreamed of building – something quite similar to the majestic and bizarre glimpse that his ancestors had drawn in the landscape. Then his dreams went down the drain together with one of ours, namely that the schools of the Kingdom, having to give a common language to who knows how many different Italys, would adopt his wonderful, irreverent and, God willing, comical novelistic torso, instead of the monument of that pesky and irremediably Lombard nuisance. But things didn’t go that way, and while today on that branch of Lake Como people fight for selfies (yeah), here there’s nothing to Instagram, and the hand is still looking for the Leica.
In Friuli, as in Holland, everything is ten or fifteen kilometers from everything. Six or seven from Colloredo is Brazzacco, the tiny village where Pietro Savorgnan di Brazzà was originally from. Brazza was a figure in whose presence Stanley, Livingstone and company seem like a group of ClubMed entertainers, yet the dirty country in which he was born, in an abundant century, did not deem it necessary to dedicate to him a book worthy of the name, nor a films, or even a series, which no one can deny has just stuck their nose out of anonymity. Yet his story would be the best key to begin to understand something of our dark, and hitherto largely silenced, relationship with Africa. But nothing – but knowing that in Brazzacco there appeared to be, no less, a Brazzà Museum, I called the custodian and asked him to visit it. The custodian, Corrado Pirzio Biroli, is also the curator of the museum itself, as well as the owner of the building, the land on which it stands, and the adjacent villa. And he descends in a direct line from Brazza himself. The villa is in such a fortunate position that it was the rotating command of all the armies that fought in these parts in two world wars, but the museum is rather small. It contains little that is original, but not the fault of Corrado, who has been working on it for years: Brazzà in fact did not leave much, and that little ended up at the bottom of the sea in an unfortunate shipwreck. It’s a shame, because judging by what was left – the boxes of soap powder or razor blades to which he had given a name and effigy in Congo, hoping to raise some money – one suspects it might not have been exactly postcard material. However, there is much else on the walls of the museum, and Corrado and I end up talking about that other thing. It is in fact inevitable to ask for information on the august characters portrayed or photographed on the walls, who are invariably grandparents, uncles, cousins or parents of Corrado himself: too bad they are called Pirzio Biroli (which means, Italian Africa) or Von Hassel (which means, the German resistance to Hitler). As for the big man with the two-horned beard up there, he was Admiral von Tirpiz, no less – that is, Conrad’s great-grandfather.
Too much history, and too intertwined, at least for one article. Better to end with something more primordial. To find it, the usual three kilometers are enough, up to another castle. Unlike Colloredo, the Villalta manor is intact, and in fact hosts weddings and assorted bacchanals there. But the point of interest is another. Immediately under the walls, in fact, there is an empty meadow, with a large mound in the center. It is a «tùmbare», one of the last funerary monuments which apparently were, millennia ago, a landmark on these plains. Below this, which is very beautiful, there are probably the remains of a Bronze Age notable: above, a large lime tree, a tree venerated by the Slavic populations who have always inhabited the region. And who, despite being forced for decades to tolerate the noisy and often annoying neighbors from the West, continue to live there undaunted.