Circumcision of Christ copied by Pomponio Amalteo in 1569 from the doors (later lost) painted in 1528 by Il Pordenone for an altarpiece originally for Venzone cathedral and now at the centre of the two triptychs on the presbytery’s walls; three sketches portraying St John the Almoner, Our Lady of the Assumption and The Decapitation of St John the Baptist drawn around 1734 by Giambattista Tiepolo for the planned frescoes which were never painted in the Church of Santa Maria della Fratta. 
    On the left side of the square in front of the cathedral stands the Monte di Pietà building (eighteenth century) with a rustic work loggia on the ground floor and a large central two-light window on the upper floor. On the South side of the cathedral another massive white construction seems to watch over the town, the ancient Town Hall, whose construction was started in 1415; it was remodelled in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the ground floor portico with five low arches is dominated by an elegant three-light opening on the upper floor. The historical archive in the town hall houses documents going back to the twelfth century as well as the original nucleus of the Guarneriana Library, the oldest public library in Friuli and one of the oldest in Italy, that takes its name from its founder, the canon and humanist Guarnerio d’Artegna. He was a descendant of the Pordenone branch of the de Artenea, a family of ancient lineage; he frequented the leading scholars of his time in Rome returning, in his old age, to the parish of San Daniele. When he died in 1466 he left the over one hundred and sixty codices he had collected ­ or that he had had copied and illuminated from the most important classical texts of his time ­ to the parish. 

These precious volumes include a Holy Bible called Byzantine, beautifully written and illustrated in Jerusalem in the late twelfth century, given to Guarnerio by the heirs of Patriarch Antonio Panciera and the subject of attentive studies in the past few decades “because of its important place in the history of illumination”. The library’s collections were particularly enlarged in 1734 when the San Daniele historian Giusto Fontanini donated thousands of manuscripts, incunabula and rare editions. Amongst the most noteworthy texts is a Bible, called Atlantica, from the end of the eleventh century from, perhaps, Spoleto; a fourteenth century illuminated Divine Comedy from Tuscany with comments in Latin and vernacular, a fifteenth-century Missale romanum of the Parma school and a Paduan illuminated copy dated 1497 of Petrarch’s Canzoniere and Trionfi. 
    Not far from the cathedral is the Church of Sant’Antonio abate, this was built at the behest of the “brotherhood” devoted to the hermit saint, consecrated in 1308 to give spiritual comfort to the patients in the adjoining Pio Ospedale di Sant’Antonio in which the “brothers” gave shelter and succour to orphans, the sick, the poor, pilgrims and travellers. The church was badly damaged by an earthquake in 1348, it was rebuilt in accordance with its original structure and was enriched with late-Gothic frescoes based on episodes from the childhood of Christ. In 1441 it was renovated and the choir was added; in 1470 the beautiful Istria stone façade was added featuring a rose tracery window with a central clipeus portraying a Virgin and Child and a splayed ogival main door surmounted by a lunette with a sculpture of St John the Baptist between SS Anthony Abbot and Anthony of Padua;