Villa Manin

The Manin family's strategy of concentrating the purchase of land in an area of ​​the Friulian countryside began as a traffic junction between the commercial area of ​​the Upper Adriatic and the roads leading from the Tagliamento valley towards the end of the seventeenth century. Central Europe, in a historical phase of loss of the central role of the Serenissima in trade between Europe, the Aegean Sea and the Middle East.

Passariano is identified, where an important agricultural and residential building of the Manin already existed, as a meeting point between the movement of goods by sea and by river (Stella, in this case) and those by land, which thanks to the "Stradone Manin ”They had to easily take the via dei monti, in the direction of San Daniele del Friuli.

Thus began the works on the building site, which in the decades following the present forms of the villa would lead above all. In the first half of the 1700s the intention of the Manin to make the country villa an active center of agricultural production and transformation of the products of the land, thanks to the construction of mills, furnaces and paper mills, was clearly outlined.

The model for the Manins is Versailles, the most sumptuous European residence: the fact that the design of the large garden to the north of the villa is entrusted to a French pupil by André Le Nôtre, the architect of the wonders desired by the Sun King.

It is instead the architect Domenico Rossi, of Lugano origin, already in the workshop of Baldassarre Longhena, also active in Venice, Ljubljana, Udine, Pordenone and in other centers of the Veneto and Friuli, who in the early decades of the eighteenth century designed the current aspect of the building and the most scenographically important interventions, such as Piazza Quadra, delimited by the barchesse, and Piazza Tonda, closed by the exedras, with a plastic effect reminiscent of Bernini's colonnade in St. Peter's Square in Rome.

A little later, in the first half of the 1700s, Giovanni Ziborghi, will raise the barchesse, while Giorgio Massari, one of the most important exponents of 18th-century Venetian architecture will build the upper crown of the noble body, while the garden takes on the typical forms of the baroque style.

In 1738 one of the most important events in the history of the villa: Maria Amalia, daughter of the king of Saxony, marries the king of Naples, and during the journey she stops in Passariano and in her honor a sumptuous ceremony is set up. In 1789 Lodovico IV Manin became the first prosecutor of San Marco and then doge, but it was the twilight years for the Serenissima Republic: the Campaign of Italy saw the triumph of the young French general Napoleon Bonaparte who put an end to this centuries-old page of history and installed himself in the villa for a few months, to conclude the negotiations with the Austrians, and then sign, in the Villa Manin itself, the Treaty of Campoformio (17 October 1797), so called to indicate a "neutral" location, between the headquarters of the Austrian delegations and French.

During the First World War Villa Manin saw the presence of the General Staff of Emperor Charles I, for the Habsburgs, and Kaiser Wilhelm II, for the dynastic House of Prussia, after the disastrous retreat of Caporetto.