Plodn: the history, the language, the timber houses

Sappada is the Italian name; Plodn is what the village calls itself in its own language, and it stands beside the other in the official name of the municipality too. The same goes for the hamlets, which in Plodarisch are called heivilan: Granvilla is Dorf, Bach is Pòch, Palù is Moss, Fontana is Prunn, Cima Sappada is Zepodn.³

This is not folklore for tourists. The names of houses, meadows and streams come from the same language, and in Sappada the name of a house is often the name of the family that lived in it. That is why those names do not appear in serious listings.

Sappada has no birth certificate. The “document of 1078” found in many guidebooks comes from a nineteenth-century misreading: that is the date of a patriarch's death, not of a grant. The first written mention dates from 2 August 1295; the first deed concerning the community is a privilege granted by the Patriarch of Aquileia on 27 December 1296, which speaks of an already ancient custom.¹²

The legend that has all the settlers arrive from Villgraten, in Tyrol, does not hold as a single origin either. Studies place their provenance in a wider area, between the upper Puster Valley and East Tyrol, and link permanent settlement to the working of the valley's iron mines.¹

From those first holdings come the hamlets: 14 farmsteads, which over the centuries became as many clusters of houses, in a row on the sunny slope.

The Sappada dialect belongs to the southern Bavarian group, transitional between East Tyrol and Carinthia. It has stayed closer to its Germanic roots than other language islands: for modern things it borrowed from German, not Italian, so a train is zuk and an aeroplane vliegar.¹

Until the middle of the twentieth century it was the everyday language. Then a decline set in, marked from the 1970s: surveys carried out in schools find a minority of children who speak it regularly, and fewer and fewer families who use it at home. There is no reliable count of speakers, and the figures in circulation have no primary source.¹

The language is protected as a historic minority by the national law of 1999 and, since the change of region, by the Friuli Venezia Giulia law on German-speaking minorities, which names “Sappada/Plodn” expressly. A local association has published a dictionary, a grammar and materials for children; at school Plodarisch comes in through fixed-term projects, not as a subject.⁵

The traditional homestead is made up of two buildings: the house and, beside it, the stable with the hayloft above. It was built in Blockbau: horizontal beams laid one on another and jointed at the corners, on a stone base, with a roof of larch shingles.⁴

The old timber can be seen in Sappada Vecchia, from Pill and Mühlbach as far as Puiche, in Cretta and in Cima Sappada. The two central hamlets are the exception. Bach burned down on 13 September 1908, Granvilla on 9 October 1928: they were rebuilt in masonry, on a regular layout. This fact alone explains half the differences in character between the hamlets.

If the old part has come down to us almost intact, that is also thanks to a road: the new one, of 1922, drew twentieth-century building down the slope. Today “Sappada Vecchia – Plodn” is on the list of Italy's Most Beautiful Villages (I Borghi più belli d'Italia).⁷

A timber house in the historic hamlets is a piece of heritage, and the law treats it as such. The whole municipality has been under landscape protection since 1956; the land-use plan places the old hamlets in a conservation zone and assigns each building a protection grade, from one to 7.⁸

In practice: no increase in volume, no complete dismantling and reassembly of a Blockbau building, ceiling heights that remain those of the period, restricted roof openings. Those who buy historic timber also buy these constraints, and need to know them before the preliminary contract.

Carnival, Plodar Vosenòcht, takes up three Sundays, dedicated to the poor, the farmers and the gentry, plus Thursday, Monday and Shrove Tuesday. The mask is the Rollate, which by unwritten rule speaks only Plodarisch.⁹

There are three museums: the Ethnographic Museum in Cima Sappada, the House-Museum of Rural Life in Cretta, and the Small Museum of the Great War. Between 1915 and the autumn of 1917 the front ran at high altitude, around the Peralba; in October 1917 the village was evacuated, and the inhabitants returned on 22 March 1919.⁹

Every September, under a vow made in 1804 against a cattle epidemic, the people of Sappada go on pilgrimage to the shrine of Maria Luggau, in Carinthia, beyond the ridge.

Sappada had passed from the province of Udine to that of Belluno on 28 March 1852. In the referendum of March 2008 the return to Friuli won 860 votes in favour out of 1,199 eligible voters. The law came nine years later, and has been in force since 16 December 2017.⁶

For buyers the change has practical consequences: local taxes are those of the Region, starting with ILIA in place of IMU, and so are grants and planning rules. What has not changed is the system by which ownership is recorded: cadastre and land registers, as in the rest of Italy.

In our listings we do not use the family names of houses, and we do not publish an old house without first asking the municipality for its plan zone and protection grade. On the hamlet pages you will find the Plodarisch name beside the Italian one.