Attila and the Colle del Castello of Udine

The story

If you go to Udine, in Friuli, and look up from the centre, you see a hill with a castle on top. It has always been there. The people of Friuli climb it, stroll on it, take their children there. Nobody asks how it comes about that in the middle of a flat plain there is, suddenly, a hill.

For centuries, someone did ask. And the answer was a legend.

They tell that in the year 452, in the middle of the fifth century, a king arrived in these lands who frightened everyone. His name was Attila, he was the chief of the Huns, a people of horsemen who had come from far away. Where he passed, cities trembled. And one of those cities was Aquileia, one of the richest and most important of the Roman Empire.

Attila besieged it and destroyed it.

But, says the story, the king of the Huns did not want only to win. He wanted to watch. He wanted to see Aquileia burn, from above, from a place where the whole fire could be seen, like a show. The problem was that in that plain there were no heights. So Attila had an idea, the kind that only a king can have.

He ordered his soldiers to build a hill.

Every horseman took off his helmet, filled it with earth, and carried it to the appointed spot. One after another, hundreds, thousands of men. The bronze and iron helmets passed from hand to hand, the earth was poured out, piled up, rose. Slowly, a hill began to grow out of nothing. When it was finished, Attila climbed to the top and looked, far away, at the fire of Aquileia lighting up the night.

This is the legend. For centuries it remained a tale. A pretty story, to tell children, to explain a strange hill.

Then, in 2022, the geologists arrived.

The Municipality of Udine wanted to build two lifts to go up to the castle. Before digging, the Soprintendenza asked for checks to be made, as is always done when work is begun on a historic site. The technicians began to take cores: long tubes that go into the ground and pull out cylinders of earth, layer by layer, like a carrot of soil.

What they found surprised them. A natural hill, in general, is made of rock, because it is rock that resists erosion. Instead, down here there was no rock. There was an alternation of gravels and clays, different layers placed one on top of another, in an order that is not nature's. They analysed the pollen preserved in the ground. They put the new data together with those of many other investigations already made over the years.

Then came the conclusion, and it was not easy to believe.

The Colle del Castello, the Castle Hill of Udine, is not natural. It was built by human beings.

Not by the Huns, however. Far too late. The date, according to the researchers, is much further back: between three thousand five hundred and three thousand years ago. We are in the Bronze Age, a time when in Italy there were not yet any Romans. Someone, in those centuries, had moved earth to make a hill. And not a small one.

The scholars have calculated that in the hill there are over four hundred thousand cubic metres of earth. That is a great deal. It is more than Silbury Hill, the great artificial mound of southern England, the one that everybody knows. It is probably the largest hill of this kind in the whole of Europe. And in Italy it has no comparison.

The earth to build it had been brought largely from a nearby area, the one where Piazza Primo Maggio is today.

Professor Alessandro Fontana, of the University of Padua, coordinated the work. The Soprintendenze and the Museums of Udine collaborated. The results were published in an international scientific journal, Scientific Reports.

And why did they make it? What was it for? For now, nobody knows. The press release leaves the question to the archaeologists. Perhaps a sacred place, perhaps a sign of power, perhaps a defence. More core drillings are under way to understand better how it is made inside.

There is something funny in all this. The University's press release says that the discovery "also seems to link up with" the legend of Attila. It does not say that it is true. But it admits that, in some way, the people had understood something right: that the hill had been made by someone, carrying earth, little by little.

They had only got it wrong by two thousand years, and by a king.