Poffabro

The Val Colvera opens up among the Dolomiti Friulane as a corridor of stone and woodland that time has passed through without disrupting. At the foot of Monte Ràut, at 525 metres above sea level, Poffabro is a hamlet of the comune of Frisanco, in the province of Pordenone, home to fewer than two hundred people and preserving a built fabric that remains substantially faithful to its sixteenth- and seventeenth-century layout. Its name most likely derives from the medieval Latin *Prafabrorum*, "the smiths' meadow", a phrase that appears in an arbitration ruling of 1339 and recurs, in 1357, in a testamentary bequest by the nobleman Galvano di Maniago in favour of his son Nichilo. Even earlier, already in the eleventh century, the parish of Poffabro was recorded among the holdings of the Bishop of Concordia, and the valley was crossed by a road leading north from the military colony of Julia Concordia, through the Alps.

The houses, built of sandstone, crowd close together, tall and narrow, linked by alleys, porticoes, arches and covered balconies. The architecture is not the result of a philological restoration but of material continuity: the houses have been inhabited without interruption, and this permanence has preserved proportions and spatial relationships that have been lost elsewhere. The parish church of San Nicolò, built in the seventeenth century, marks the religious heart of the village. In Piazza XX Settembre, in the building that once housed the communal dairy, the visitor centre of the Parco Naturale Dolomiti Friulane (Friulian Dolomites Nature Park) documents the practice of alpine pasturing and the cheesemaking traditions of the local malghe (mountain dairy huts). The Associazione Scarpeti, for its part, preserves the valley's craft heritage through wooden objects, the traditional Friulian footwear known as *scarpeti*, embroidery and needlework.

Poffabro joined the association of Italy's Borghi più belli d'Italia (Most Beautiful Villages of Italy) in 2002 and has been awarded the Bandiera Arancione (Orange Flag) certification by the Touring Club Italiano. These recognitions have brought a flow of around twenty thousand visitors a year, a figure that, set against the scale of the place, defines a fragile balance between visitation and conservation. During the Christmas period, the initiative known as "Poffabro, presepe tra i presepi" (Poffabro, a nativity scene among nativity scenes) transforms the alleys and balconies into a diffuse exhibition space, drawing visitors from beyond the region as well. The village forms part of the wider context of the Parco Naturale Dolomiti Friulane, a protected area that includes some of the most rugged rock faces in Friuli, and stands as one of the few examples of rural mountain architecture in this territory that remains legible in its entirety.