Poffabro sits at a little over five hundred meters in the Val Colvera, immersed in the Carnic Prealps of the Pordenone countryside, and in fall the whole hamlet, part of the municipality of Frisanco, seven kilometres from Maniago, and home to barely two hundred people, seems to draw the mist in off the surrounding woods and hold it there past midday, so that the stone houses only fully emerge once the sun has cleared the ridge above them.
Its name comes from the meadow where the valley’s smiths once worked, Prafabrorum, “prato dei fabbri,” first written down in a notarial document of 1339. By then, the settlement already sat along a route the Romans had used centuries earlier to cross from Julia Concordia toward the lands north of the Alps, a road that made Poffabro, however small, a place plenty of people actually passed through.
