No one living in Friuli will ever forget the evening of May 6, 1976. Just before 9:00pm, a magnitude 4.5 earthquake struck the Alto Friuli area, shaking the ground for 30 seconds and cutting power as far away as Udine. Minutes later, another quake struck, this one a magnitude 6.4 and lasting twice as long. More than five hundred aftershocks continued to jolt the region over the next few months, culminating in a magnitude 6.1 quake on September 15, 1976. All told, these quakes killed nearly one thousand people and razed thousands of homes.
The largest of these earthquakes were felt strongly across most of northern Italy and as far south as Rome, as well as in other countries such as then-Yugoslavia, Austria, Germany, and Belgium. The epicenter of this terrible disaster, however, was right in the heart of Friuli-Venezia Giulia, just south of Gemona del Friuli. Both Gemona and the medieval-walled town of Venzone to its north were utterly demolished.
Some architectural treasures, such as Venzone’s Duomo di Sant’Andrea and Palazzo Comunale, did not collapse from the May seismic activity, but due to structural damage sustained at that time, the Duomo was subsequently destroyed in the September 15 quake. Gemona’s Duomo di Santa Maria Assunta, also suffered major damage during both quakes.
Following the earthquakes, Gemona, Venzone, and other surrounding towns began the long process of rebuilding, with initiatives passed by local officials that regulated how this process would occur. In the case of historic buildings, the goal was to preserve the original materials in order to reconstruct them as faithfully as possible, a technique known as anastylosis. In Venzone, for example, volunteers established a committee to salvage the thousands of individual stones from the rubble and catalog them according to type of material and location found. Once the reassembly had begun, replacement, or “integration,” stones were marked with a special carving on the top, so as to distinguish them from the authentic stones that had fallen from the original structure.
After more than two decades of work, the task of rebuilding Gemona and Venzone was finally completed. The successful rebirth of these two towns has set an example for the rest of the world to follow, an innovative model of reconstruction that has come to be known in the field of architecture as the “Friuli model.” For the most part, the streets and buildings now appear unscathed, but if you wander long enough, you will likely stumble upon some rubble left untouched—perhaps the ruins of Gemona’s Chiesa di Santa Maria delle Grazie or Venzone’s Chiesa di San Giovanni Battista—a reminder of that fateful year.
