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It is fitting that the best artworks in UDINE , seventy one kilometres northwest of Trieste, are by Giambattista Tiepolo: his airy brilliance suits this town. Running beside and beneath the streets are little canals called rogge , diverted from the Torre and Cormor rivers, and these bright streams reflect light onto the walls and through the roadside greenery. Comfortable and bourgeois, Udine is the second city of Friuli-Venezia Giulia, and some say that although it has less than half the population of Trieste, it will gain the ascendancy sooner or later. Certainly it's already far more attractive to visitors, with its galleries, fine churches and well-preserved historic buildings around Piazza Libertà. Udine seems everything that Trieste is not - delicate, untroubled, successful.
Along with Cividale, Tricesimo and Zuglio, Udine was one of the frontier bastions of Imperial Rome, and by the sixth century AD it was far more than a garrison colony. Legend has it that the castle-topped hill at the heart of Udine was built by Attila's hordes, using their helmets as buckets, so that their leader could relish the spectacle of Aquileia in flames, 36km away. But it was not until the thirteenth century that it started to become a regional centre. Patriarch Bertoldo di Andechs (1218-51) can be seen as the father of Udine - he established two markets (the "old market" in Via Mercatovecchio, and the new one in Piazza Matteotti, still a marketplace), moved the patriarchate from Cividale to the castle of Udine, and set up a city council. In 1362 the dukes of Austria acquired the place by treaty, but not for long: Venice, now hungry for territory, captured Udine in 1420, after several assaults and sieges. The city was ruled by Venetian governors for almost 400 years - until 1797, when the Venetian Republic surrendered to Napoleon. Even now, the old aristocracy of Udine speak a version of Venetian dialect, while the humbler Udinese, many of whom have migrated from the countryside, speak friulano .
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