Documentation and texts taken from www.vivivalcolvera.it, the beautiful site we invite you to visit.

"Due to its fortunate position – halfway between the green shelter of the Friulian Dolomites and the not too distant plain – Val Colvera has been inhabited since prehistoric times, as evidenced by traces of human settlements found in some of the caves that line its streams.

Although later marginally touched by an ancient Roman road of great passage, the valley has managed to maintain a proud identity character, testified by its cultural and architectural peculiarities.

The name of the main town, Frisanco, is mentioned for the first time in a notarial document from 1293 and seems to derive from a personal name of Germanic origin, Freidank, a potentate to whom the land that today hosts the village was assigned, it is hypothesized.

The genesis of the toponym of Poffabro is clearer, appearing a few years later as “Prafabrorum” or “decimam de Pratum Fabri”, a “blacksmith's meadow” left as an inheritance by the noble Galvano, lord of Maniago, to his son Nichilo in the year 1357: the original text hints at the existence “on the slopes of Mount Raut” of a blacksmith's workshop very similar to those of nearby Maniago, known as the “city of knives”.

While Poffabro and the “Comunello di Casasola” which was once called Cizarollo (the name derives from the fact that the first stables were built near the Ceresâr – cherry – stream), would eventually fall under the jurisdiction of the Maniago fief, Frisanco and nearby Cavasso would become the property of the equally powerful counts of Polcenigo: a curious fragmentation for a territory of relatively limited proportions (the two municipalities would be reunited only much later by the Napoleonic register, but would maintain until today another historical separation, that of the two parishes of Santa Fosca and Maura in Frisanco and San Nicolò in Poffabro).

In the late Middle Ages and the early decades of the Modern Age, villages and hamlets began to assume their peculiarity of greater tourist attraction: the splendid typical architecture of the valley, with houses arranged in long rows or in closed courtyards, accessed through an arch.

The architectural heritage of Val Colvera, the now famous stone and wood houses, original and perfectly preserved, combines modern criteria of livability and great respect for tradition: in the valley, the splendid sandstone or limestone houses prevail, three or four stories high, with wooden balconies, made of strictly local materials, in perfect symbiosis with the nature in which they seem to merge.

The layout of the buildings follows a common scheme: on the ground floor kitchen and pantry; on the first floor the bedrooms, on the top floor barn and granary. A repeated design that also responds to practical needs: building the houses close to each other presents undeniable economic advantages. The valley inhabitants know this well, as they still keep alive the memory of past hardships, when between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries their ancestors had to present numerous petitions to the government of the Serenissima to be exempted from heavy taxes; appeals of which written traces are also preserved in parish archives and in which those who could write took it upon themselves to inform the rulers that for these lands the devastation of the woods was exceedingly burdensome; Val Colvera inhabitants to supply a distant city, which thinking of its own needs effectively deprived the valley population of its only true asset.

The weight of Venetian domination was also felt in an incredible case of news that occurred in the mid-seventeenth century, when the Holy Inquisition of the lagoon city sent its officials to the valley to investigate a suspected case of witchcraft. On the Plan di Malgustà, located halfway up Mount Raut – it was said that demonic sabbaths took place every Thursday night.

The meetings between demons were animated by the presence of witches said to come from Frisanco and Poffabro, where by day they assumed human and reassuring appearances: in the mountains, however, according to the inquisitors, they reported to the devil their misdeeds. Disheveled, they gathered in a circle and danced trampling a cross, displayed the bodies of newborns they claimed to have made die of consumption, engaged in cannibalistic rites. Witness to the event is the young valley inhabitant Mattia di Bernardone, transported at night on a flying goat to the Plan di Malgustà by his grandmother: the child would undergo a long trial by the tribunal of the Holy Inquisition (from 1648 to 1650) and many other valley inhabitants were required to give official depositions, in a true witch hunt. After two years of trials, insinuations, accusations, and appeals, the clamor subsided and everything dissolved into a soap bubble: in the city of Pordenone a similar but much larger case had broken out, and the Venetian curia found it more interesting to turn its attention there, abandoning any interest in young Mattia and the suspicious conduct of his grandmother.

Having exited History with a capital H, life in Val Colvera continued for decades in a manner similar to that of any other mountain community in the upper Pordenonese. Over time, a good demographic increase was recorded (at the beginning of the 1700s, Poffabro alone with its comunello of Casasola counted a thousand souls) until the painful, long period of emigration to Europe and the Americas, also favored by the opening of the “Bus di Colvera” road in 1888, which promoted exchanges and trade with the plain, but also facilitated an inexorable, partial abandonment of the villages".

Text by Anna Vallerugo