Cividale del Friuli

UNESCO World Heritage Site (Longobards In Italy, Places Of Power, Inscribed 2011), Whose Cividale Component Is The Eighth Century Tempietto Longobardo And The Monastery Complex Around It · Cividale del Friuli, Friuli Venezia Giulia

Almost nothing survives of Lombard art in Italy, because the Lombards ruled for two centuries and then were absorbed, and what they built was mostly rebuilt over. Cividale has the exception: a small square chapel above the river, put up in about the eighth century, with six life-size stucco figures of female saints standing in a row above the door, their robes modelled and their faces intact, surrounded by a vine frieze cut in the same plaster. Nobody knows who made them and there is nothing else like them anywhere in Europe. The room holds about a dozen visitors at a time. The town around it was the first Lombard duchy in Italy, founded by Julius Caesar before that, and it stands on a gorge crossed by a high stone bridge that the devil is supposed to have built in one night. It is twenty minutes from Udine, it is on the Slovenian border, and it is the centre of Friuli's best white wine country.

Via Monastero Maggiore 34, Cividale del Friuli, Friuli Venezia Giulia, 33043, Italy

NO OPENING TIME HERE WAS CHECKED. The structure: the Tempietto opens daily with a midday interval, shorter winter hours and a LIMITED NUMBER OF VISITORS AT A TIME. The Christian Museum keeps cathedral hours; the archaeological museum closes one day a week and is on the state free first Sunday scheme. The Ipogeo Celtico has irregular opening and may need a key collected nearby. The bridge, the gorge and the streets never close. Confirm the Tempietto and the Ipogeo before travelling.

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