Palazzo Comunale (Palazzo Pretorio di Cividale)

Facing Cividale's cathedral, the Town Hall stacks seven centuries of civic government in one facade: a medieval commune rebuilt in the Renaissance, marked by the Lion of San Marco and noble coats of arms, decorated inside by Francesco Chiarottini, and standing over the excavated rooms of a Roman house.

Why it matters

Cividale has governed itself for a very long time, and this building is the continuous seat of that story. A communal house is documented beside the cathedral by the late thirteenth century; the present structure rose between 1545 and 1588 and has been reworked ever since, absorbing a noblemen's club, Venetian emblems and an Austrian emperor's commemorative plaque along the way. Unlike the town's museums, this remains a working municipal palace, its facade and loggia linking civic history with the present.

What to notice

The ogival portico opens the ground floor. On the facade toward the Duomo sits the embossed Lion of San Marco with an inscription of 1560, the Venetian republic's signature; lower down, a plaque recalls the visit of Emperor Franz I of Austria in 1816, and a baroque cornice frames the bust of Domenico Mocenigo, the Venetian provveditore credited for his conduct during the plague of 1682. Under the loggia, the wooden roof beams carry the painted coats of arms of Cividale's noble families, executed by Tiburzio Donadon. Plaques honouring Garibaldi and Vittorio Emanuele II face the square, and since 1935 a bronze statue of Julius Caesar — a copy of the Trajan-era marble in Rome's Capitoline museums — has stood before the main front as the town's mythical founder. Inside, the council hall hangs with portraits of Venetian provveditori, two rooms keep frescoes that Chiarottini painted between 1790 and 1795 for the adjacent Casino dei Nobili, and a 1971 mosaic by Gianni Borta shows a Lombard battle.

Context and history

The communal house appears in records of 1286 as adjacent to the city's main church of Santa Maria, and again in 1296; it was reworked in the early fifteenth century and rebuilt across the mid-sixteenth, reaching its present form between 1545 and 1588. Around 1700 the west side of the great loggia was walled up and annexed to the Casino dei Nobili, the club of the local aristocracy, whose rooms joined the Town Hall proper in 1866. In the mid-1930s the architect Forlati removed the external staircase, exposed the brick facades and reopened the loggia; the eastward extension that completes the building today was added between the late 1960s and early 1970s. Under the courtyard paving, workers in 1938 uncovered a Roman house of the first and second centuries with seven identified rooms — the most visible retains an unusually well-preserved black-and-white mosaic floor — evidence of the Roman dwelling beneath today's civic palace.