Friaul
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Information about the region of Friaul:
Friaul - some links to this region: http://www.turismo.fvg.it Travel and traffic routes, excursions: |
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The
last Doge of Venice, Ludovico Manin, retired to this area
at the end of the eighteenth century when the Venetian Republic
fell to the Friuli Venezia Giuliablows of Napoleon Bonaparte.
These days, whoever visits Villa Manin in the province of
Udine, detects a hint of twilight in the air, almost as if
the memory of the old gentleman who came here to pass the
autumn of his life was influencing the visitors and inducing
a melancholic mood in them. But this is a pleasant sensation,
that leads to a more intimate and intense kind of aesthetic
enjoyment. The same sensation recurs all over this beautiful
and severe border region, where almost every town boasts a
museum (those of Udine, Tolmezzo, Pordenone, Cividale del
Friuli, Gorizia, and Aquileia are particularly important and
interesting), and is able to surprise with the plurality of
architectural styles (in the centre of Udine the Venetian
Gothic of the Palazzo del Comune faces the beautiful twentieth-century
Art Deco Caffé Contarena) and cultural attractions
(at Udine again, there are galleries of historic and modern
art). 
Highly
suggestive is the Basilica in Aquileia, now a small town but
once an important city of the Roman Empire. Trieste, in Venezia
Giulia, the most "middle-European" of Italian cities,
rich in history and culture, with its important ancient and
modern artistic heritage, has been loved and represented by
great literary figures (James Joyce, Italo Svevo, Umberto
Saba and many others). Grado in the province of Gorizia is
the favourite of many tourists who regularly return for its
sea and particularly healthy climate.
