Cividale and the Natisone valleys: where houses cost least, and what comes with it

Three landscapes share this zone. Cividale has 5 secondary-school sites, the shops and most of the property sales. Corno di Rosazzo, Prepotto and Torreano are hill municipalities. Then come the Natisone valleys, from San Pietro and San Leonardo up to Pulfero, Savogna, Grimacco, Drenchia and Stregna, where villages are small and far apart.

The town itself: our Cividale profile.

Since 1 December 2025 Cividale has had a community health centre with a clinic for non-urgent needs; its first-aid point has closed. For 18 municipalities and around 46,000 people it had been closer than today's nearest A&E.

• Emergencies: dial 112. Udine has the closest A&E and is also the reference hospital for heart attacks and strokes: 34 min from San Pietro, 49 min from Grimacco. Corno di Rosazzo and Prepotto are nearer to Palmanova (22 min and 31 min).
• Out of hours: the medical on-call service is 116117, with interpreting available.
• Across the border: the general hospital at Šempeter pri Gorici is 43 min from Cividale; where an ambulance goes is decided by the emergency control room.

Visitors from the EU use their EHIC card for necessary care; new residents may need to register with the national health service. Details: hospitals and A&E.

A local variety of Slovene has been spoken in the valleys for generations. In San Pietro al Natisone a bilingual Italian–Slovene school was set up in 1984 to keep it alive; today it is a state school from nursery to lower secondary, recognised under Law 38 of 2001, which protects the region's Slovene minority. In the Italian education ministry's register it is the only school in the province of Udine with Slovene as a language of instruction.

Sales cluster in Cividale: 169 in 2025 (+18.3%), out of 252 in the whole OMI district of Cividale and the valleys. The small villages trade too: in Stregna 2.7% of the housing stock changed hands in a year, above the regional rate (2.4%).

There is plenty to choose from: in 2011, 60% of homes in Drenchia and 47% in Grimacco had no resident. For buyers who move their residence here, 9 municipalities count as fully mountainous, where the region pays €15,500 towards buying a first home, provided you have lived in Friuli Venezia Giulia for at least five of the last eight years (the rules).

In the valleys the way a slope faces matters more than its height. On 21 December Drenchia's town hall, at 696 m, gets 8 h 32 min of sun; Grimacco, lower down in the valley, gets 4 h 50 min, and one spot 250 metres from its town hall gets none (winter sun). Rainfall is high: 2,210 mm a year in Pulfero, 1,570 mm in Cividale. In summer people swim in the Natisone: ARPA samples a bathing area at Stupizza, in Pulfero.

What to weigh up:

• Landslides: 21.4% of buildings in Drenchia and 11.9% in Grimacco sit on land rated at high or very high risk of landslides (floods and landslides).
• Shopping: Drenchia has no pharmacy, and from Drenchia and Prepotto the nearest supermarket is in Slovenia.
• Broadband: fibre reaches 2.7% of homes in Corno di Rosazzo and 18.0% in Pulfero; Cividale is at 86.0%.
• Trains: the Udine–Cividale line has no trains for now, and buses run while engineering works go on; the closest working station is Buttrio, 18 min away by car.