Friuli-Venezia Giulia
In Collio the soil breaks apart in your hand. It is ponca, layers of marl and sandstone laid down on the floor of an ancient sea, and it flakes like slate. Below the hills the Isonzo runs green and cold toward the Adriatic, and a century ago twelve battles were fought along its banks. The border with Slovenia runs through the vineyards, and the same hills carry on into Brda on the other side. Here, in the 1960s and 1970s, a few families made the clean, precise white wines that changed Italian winemaking, and the whites of Friuli remain among the most fascinating and dynamic anywhere in the world. Friulano, Ribolla Gialla, and Malvasia grow beside Schioppettino, a red grape that nearly vanished and came back. I build the week along the border and the river that drew it. Long before the world was introduced to orange wine, in the hamlet of Oslavia a handful of families revived the old practice of fermenting white grapes on their skins, some in clay amphorae buried in the ground, and the wines came out amber.
CULINARY ARTS
In San Daniele, prosciutto hangs for at least thirteen months in air that moves between the Alps and the sea. Montasio cheese comes down from the mountain dairies, and frico, potato and onion bound with melted Montasio and browned in the pan, comes out of every farmhouse kitchen. In Cividale the bakers roll gubana, a spiral of walnuts, raisins, and grappa. On the Carso above Trieste, farm families open osmize, the eight-day taverns an Austrian emperor allowed them in 1784, and serve their own wine, cured meats, and eggs. In Trieste, coffee is a language of its own, and the cafés still order it in dialect.
CULTURE & LEISURE
At Aquileia, the floor of the basilica is the largest early Christian mosaic in the Western world, laid in the 4th century and buried for centuries. In Cividale del Friuli, the Lombard Tempietto stands above the Natisone and the Devil’s Bridge. Palmanova, the star-shaped fortress town the Venetians built in 1593, still keeps its nine points. In Trieste, Miramare Castle sits on the water, and James Joyce wrote much of Dubliners in the city. Hemingway set A Farewell to Arms on the Isonzo front. In winter, the Julian Alps at Tarvisio and Sella Nevea are under two hours from the Collio vineyards, close enough to ski in the morning and taste in the afternoon.
ARTISAN TRADITIONS
Maniago has forged blades since the 1400s, and its workshops still make knives by hand. Manzano built a whole district on chairs. In Spilimbergo, the mosaic school founded in 1922 trains craftsmen who cut stone and glass by hand and lay it the way the Romans did at Aquileia, an hour away.
