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you arrive in Udine for the first time by train and start to explore
the town from the station, you can reach the town centre by passing
through Porta Aquileia, one of Udine’s most characteristic landmarks.
The city’s documented history goes back a thousand years it was mentioned for the first time in a diploma issued by the Emperor Otto ii in 983 but according to archaeological evidence it is almost two thousand years old. Over the centuries, as many as five sets of increasingly extensive walls have been erected around the centre.
The tower of Porta Aquileia belongs to the fifth and final ring of walls, the one that gave the city an almost circular configuration. It dates back to the late fourteenth century and conserves, on the south side, four coats of arms in stone. One is illegible, one is the symbol of the Savorgnans, an ancient Udinese noble family, one belongs to the Patriarch of Aquileia and the last is that of the Comune.
There are very few other monuments from Udine’s early history. The tower of San Bartolomeo, or Porta Manin, is the only gate left from the third ring of city walls, constructed between 1273 and 1299. The others, together with the walls themselves, were knocked down piecemeal over the centuries, the coup de grâce coming in 1880 from the Town Council, which ordered their final demolition to create space for the expanding city.
Today, no one realises they are traversing the oldest part of Udine when they walk along Via Rialto yet around the year 1000 it was here that there sprang up one of the small villages that surrounded the castle. This was the “villa Udin” that would later give its name to the entire town.
In fact, several centuries had still to pass before the small settlements that huddled together on the slopes of the hill would finally be worthy of the definition “town”. There was a period of expansion in the thirteenth century but the castle remained the only really significant edifice. In the following century, Udine became the capital of the patriarchal state of Aquileia and the patriarchs themselves began to spend more and more time in residence in the town, which they preferred to Cividale.
However, it was Bertrando di San Genesio who raised Udine to the position of the leading community in the patriarchal state and contributed to its economic and cultural development. In 1355, he consecrated the Duomo, or cathedral, which was built on the site of an earlier church dedicated to Saint Odoric, and in 1349 he commissioned Vitale da Bologna to execute a series of frescoes that is today one of the finest and most complete paintings in Friuli to survive from the fourteenth century.
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Bitter, bloody internecine struggles, often for obscure
rea-sons, continued until the arrival of the Venetians, who took advantage of the political instability to enter Udine on 6 June 1420 and put an end to the patriarchal state. The whole of Friuli was now part of the Most Serene Republic of
Venice.
From that year until 1797, a long series of Venetian lieu-
tenants arrived to govern the entire region from the city.
The townscape of Udine’s historic centre as we see it today began to take shape during the period of Venetian domination in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries. In 1448, work was started on the Loggia del Lionello, to a plan by the Udinese
goldsmith, Nicolò Lionello. It involved a major effort by Bartolomeo delle Cisterne, the master mason from Capodistria who also built the cathedral
baptistery. The clock tower in Piazza Libertà, which stands where the main castle gate was once
located, dates from 1527 and is the work of Giovanni Ricamatore from Udine. The
fountain, built to a design by Giovanni Carrara, an architect from Bergamo, was added in 1542.
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