Pordenone & District
Pordenone is a small city with 50000 inhabitants. It is in the North-East of Italy, near Venice, and it's about an hour far from the Slovenian,Croatian and Autrian borders. Its particular position makes it easy to reach quickly the summer resorts of the Adriatic Sea (Lignano, Bibione, Jesolo, Caorle) and the well known skiing places of Piancavallo where the competitions of the World Ski Cup once took place.
The first village was created as a river harbour along the Noncello river during the Medieval time. In fact the name "Portus Naonis" comes from its being an harbour.
However in this area there already were some agricultural settlements in the Roman Age and this is demonstrated by some ruins of a villa found in Torre.
In 1278, after being run by different feudatories, Pordenone passed to the Habsburgs and it became an Austrian enclave in the territory that was under the patriarch of Aquileia.
In the 16th century the settlement became bigger thanks to numerous river trades. In 1314 Pordenone became a "city".
In 1508 Bartolomeo d'Alviano conquered it for the Venetian Republic which gave him the seigniory of the city. Only after the extinction of this family in 1537, the city was governed directly by Venice through its providers. The Serenissima kept the city statutes and recognized the privileges already kept with the seigniory of the Hapsburgs. It also reactivated Pordenone's economy creating a new harbour and increasing the handcrafts. In this period the old town centre, that is called Contrada Maggiore, was architectonically improved. It is still made up of two main streets full of Gothic and Renaissance palaces and esteemed frescos. After the fall of the Venetian Republic, Pordenone firstly passed to the Austrian government and then to Napoleon. After Napoleon's fall and the Congress of Vienna, the city and the rest of Friuli and Veneto were added to the Lombard-Venetian Reign. With the realisation of the Pontebbana Street and of the railway (1855), the harbour and the river's role declined, but in the meantime the industry started to assert. After many paper mills and the Ceramica Galvani factory, a lot of cotton mills were built from 1840.
After the annexation to the Italian Reign(1866), the introduction of electricity in 1888 allowed the modernization of the installation systems and an increase of the industrial production.
The destructions produced by the First World War and the 1929 crisis caused a slow decline of the cotton system that has never taken up again. After the Second World War, Zanussi, that is now a branch of the Swedish multinational firm Electrolux, which until that moment was just a small firm that produced kitchens, became a huge European household appliances producer that gives a potion to a lot of inhabitants.