Slavia Friulana
The territory is located in the Italian region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia, between the town of Cividale del Friuli (not included) and the Slovenian border.
The Venetian words Schiavoni and Schiavonia were general terms used for all South Slavic peoples with which they came in direct contact, Slovenes as well as for Croats and Serbs from Dalmatia.
Paulus Diaconus, a Lombard historian at the court of Charlemagne, mentioned the local Slavs from the region in his magnum opus Historia Langobardorum.
They were incorporated into the Frankish Empire and Christianized maybe by missionaries from Aquileia, one of the most important centers of the Roman Catholic Church in Northern Italy.
The Venetian authorities decided to absorb the "gastaldia di Antro" in the Cividale's one, but at the same time they gave the local Slavs a remarkable autonomy.
In fact, the territory was structured in two co-valleys (Antro and Merso) represented by their people's assemblies called arenghi; each co-valley had also the right to elect its own judges and its own tribunals (banche) whose judiciary power extended to the villages that weren't the object of feudal investitures; the whole Schiavonia had important tax benefits and its only military duties were to provide 200 men for the border defense against the neighbouring Habsburg Empire and fortify the nearby city of Cividale and the fortress of Palmanova as well.
The Habsburg authorities abolished the ancient privileges of the local Slav populations, as they had already done with a similar system of autonomy in neighboring Tolmin County in 1717.
In 1866, the region became part of Italy by a referendum (won with 3,687 votes against 1), with the exception of the villages of Breginj and Livek which were included in the Austrian County of Gorizia and Gradisca.
Scholars who wrote about Slavia Friulana included the Italo-Slavs Carlo Podrecca and Francesco Musoni, the Polish linguist Jan Niecisław Baudouin de Courtenay, the Slovenes Simon Rutar and Henrik Tuma.
This trend became even more pronounced after the annexation of the Julian March to the Kingdom of Italy in 1920, when a large Slovene-speaking minority was included within the borders of the Italian state.
[1] During World War II the Slovene partisan resistance, led by the Liberation Front of the Slovenian People, penetrated the region.
Although Yugoslavia started its dissolution after Josip Broz Tito died in 1980 and the cold war ended in 1989, this ethnic debate hasn't been cleared yet and it's still caged within an ideological contest.
[4] Many of the villages lost more than two thirds of their populations, as Slavs from Friulian Slavia moved to larger urban areas in Northern Italy, Switzerland, Belgium and Germany.
In the last decades, some local politicians have been asking for a popular referendum concerning the self-ethnic definition of these people, but the project has never been possible to carry out because it has been boycotted by the most ideologized groups.
Besides its archaic traditional music and dances, the Resia valley is also known for its folk tales, mainly animal fables; these were edited and translated into standard Slovene by the scholar Milko Matičetov, and published as a children's picture book by Mladinska knjiga in 1976.
The book saw eight editions and was adapted into a puppet show ("Beasties from Resia") by RTV Slovenija in 1976, with a huge impact in popularizing the Friulian Slav folk culture in Slovenia.
The project, which is the most important cultural and artistic event in the region, is an attempt to bring together contemporary visual art with and the local folk traditions.
