In Grimak, Valli del Natisone, Easter 2014

Valli del Natisone, Friaul, Easter 2014

Spending the Easter week with friends in Italian-Slovenian borderlands, Julian Alps and their southern foothills of Valli del Natisone. Easter 2014.

Valli del Natisone is a neutral geographical name for the Italian-Slovenian borderland with a large rural Slovenian minority on the Italian side of the border all the way down to the Italian dominated towns of Cividale and Trieste. Historically a crossroads of threefold influences, with Germanic people extending over ages their realms south towards the Adria — think of early middle ages Langobard remnants in Cividale or the Austro-Hungarian monuments of Trieste harbour — and Romanic people pushing East — but they were not always exactly Italians of the Adria, they were Friulians actually — and Slavic people diffusing far, surprisingly far more West as the today’s reach of the Slovenian language and its dialects. Confronted with the well preserved and somehow all-too-present remnants of the bloody first world war Isonzo Battle where Italian and Austro-German armies viciously clashed, one can only feel sympathy to the underdog: all these innocent Slovenian villages, destroyed for being in the wrong place in the wrong time.

Now a sleepy borderland, the province of provinces, green valleys to the south of the Julian Alps, with far views of the Adriatic Sea, where now, and I find it beautiful, nobody cares of the language you use while refueling your car at the local petrol station.