The infrastructure policy as a prerequisite of industrialization was the renaissance model that the Friuli inhabitants had experienced with the unification of Italy. Pontebbana railroad and the Ledra-Tagliamento Channel, costructed in a very short time, had been accompanied by research centers and studies, of which the Technical Institute "Antonio Zanon", the so called "little University of Udine," was an emblem. A pattern quite similar to what Quintino Sella had adopted in 1866 for the resurgence of the Friuli was approved unanimously by the Regional Council in a meeting held on 1 February 1977. The basic document of the reconstruction matched the strengthening of higher education and the establishment of the University of Udine, in particular with the restructuring of the main road system, something indispensable for the widespread industrialization of the area.

The upgrading of roads, highways and railways infrastructures of international interest first of all dealt with the modernization and doubling of the Pontebbana railway from Udine to Tarvisio, then the completion of the motorway from Carnia to Coccau, the modernization of roads n. 13 in the section Pontebba - Malborghetto and n. 251 Maniago-Barcis, and finally the construction of the tunnel of Monte Croce Carnico and of "a western road infrastructure connecting the montain base" (Cimpello-Sequals-Gemona).

The old Pontebbana railroad was kept active until the completion of the new one. Nowadays an almost complete cycle path occupies the formertrack and touches the abandoned stations of Moggio, Resiutta, Chiusaforte, Dogna, Pietratagliata. The new railway that runs almost entirely in tunnels from Moggio to Pontebba, from Pontebba to Tarvisio, allows high speeds and greater frequency of trains. The line potential is only partially exploited also due to the fact that the development of the Adriatic ports is not yet in place, and there the roads and the motorway absorb some of of the traffic, because the Balkans after the fall of the Berlin Wall have assumed a new value.

The motorway, made with engineering criteria similar to those of the railway in terms of tunnels and viaducts, was completed in 1986. The exit for Osoppo, opened late for contrasts between municipalities, comes before those of Carnia, Pontebba and Tarvisio. Trips such as Udine-Tolmezzo or Udine-Tarvisio now can be covered in a very short time comparing to 1976. The main road 13 Pontebbana fully rebuilt from Tricesimo to Coccau is a toll-less, modern and fast. The Maniago-Barcis galleries have solved the traffic problems in Valcellina, and the consequent access to the Piave valley via Longarone. While the western mountain –base road, built from Cimpello to Sequals for completion towards Gemona, presents new obstacles, the tunnel of Monte Croce Carnico project has been abandoned party due to the different Austrian centralized transport strategies.

The main roads that were supposed to enhance the movement of goods and persons from the Adriatic to central and Eastern Europe have played and still perform their task without exhausting its potential. It is harder to judge wheder there have been benefits for the mountains valleys leys have made are analyzed. The reconstruction has not rewarded the areas already in economic and demographic decline, on the contrary it has favoured their abandon.

Dogna, whose chiouts, farmhouses in altitude, have been completely redone, is dominated by the State road n. 13, which seems to consider look the village, the church and the bell tower as obstacles to be avoided.

Pontebba, which lies in a stretch of a valley deeply cut into by the stream Fella, is stifled by what remains of the railway station (the large custom-house was closed in 1993), by the new railway, the national road, the highway, the huge junction roads and by the pipeline.

These two cases explain enough how the recovery of housing has not supported the economic and social growth anywhere, since the mountain has often suffered invasive road infrastructure, without raising objections or proposing alternatives. The main roads, which in Canal del Ferro sometimes seem imposed with arrogance, have been accepted as part of an inexorable demographic decline, of an almost definitive renunciation to all progress.

The disorderly growth of forest on slopes that were once meadows and pastures testifies the end of mountain farming as a subsidiary income and as a landscape-caring system, and it confirms the reconstruction as an accelerator of negative economic processes that existed previous the earthquake.

Endangered lifestyles were canceled harshly. In the mountais, where subsidiary agriculture, involving the care of meadows and pastures and woodlands, was already in serious decline, settlements were rebuilt according to new criteria, which took account of newer needs and thus excluded stables and barns. From this point of wiew the rebirth of Friuli represents as a break in tradition, the end of a slow process of decay.

The University of Udine

In the document unanimously approved by the Regional Council on 1 February 1977, there is a reference to the Regional Urban Plan (PUR), drafted immediately before the catastrophe. It recommends a welding of the reconstruction work with the overall design of the development of the Friuli-Venezia Giulia Region. At issue were the reintegration of the territory affected into the whole region and the continuity of the programs in place before May 1976 in favor of the Friuli economic and social growth. The national reconstruction law of 8 August 1977 welcomed the strategic choice based on the repair of damaged buildings, or the so-called "where it was, how it was" principle. The fact, that enhanced the will to restart the development process interrupted by the earthquake without losing touch with its territory, was immediately shared and strongly demanded by public opinion. Research centers worked therefore in supporting the restoration of buildings and the completion of road infrastructures for regional safety and the expansion of industry.

The founding of the University of Udine, which was among the projects developed before the earthquake, reestablished the continuity of development programs that the earthquake might have stopped. From this point of wiew the Friuli university can be considered - even for the manner in which it was created - a significant and exemplary moment of the reconstruction.

The request for a medical faculty in Udine, emphasized by the student demonstrations of 1965 and 1966, dated back to the early Sixties. At the time it was accepted the idea of a regional university in two different places. It's important to read again the reasons why in later years it was urged that certain degree courses or faculties be transfered to Udine.

In 1972 the Consortium for the Constitution and the Development of University Courses in Udine, at the Presidency of the Regional Government in Trieste, agreed with the rector of Trieste and in front of the regional councilors for education and health that there would be activated in Udine sections of the faculties of engineering, science, Slavic languages and literatures, which would set up commissions to launch the courses in medicine and transport sciences.

It was immediately clear that the University of Trieste would not keep faith with the undertaking , so the choice of an independent University became necessary.

In 1974 Diego Carpenedo, on behalf of the Province of Udine, proposed to set up - now in the contrast of separate University – a degree programme in industrial technology in order to support small and medium industries, in soil conservation and land use planning, the establishment of the agrarian faculty. He emphasized - unambiguously and certainly not for a merely personal purpose - a direct relationship between scientific research, industrial and environmental safety development. He defined what should be the distinctive character of the new university: to govern development and territory.

The law for the reconstruction of Friuli, which included the creation of a faculty of Eastern European languages, engineering for soil conservation and for the management of enterprises, agricultural and food preparation sciences, at Udine, respected and pursued this orientation. In 1979 a building programme was drown up according to which the new university would be established in the territory of the city to determine useful integrations with the cultural and scientific facilities of the same.

Udine was already the capital of reconstruction, as it welcomed research centers, professionals, technical journals, publishers specifically oriented to the solution of the problems that the earthquake had raised, but mainly because it was the place where political forces normally at odds with each other had found an agreement without ceding their own ideological beliefs and cooperating with energy and realism to the resumption of Friuli. The case of "Rebuild", the quarterly journal for technical information founded in 1977, is significant, because it was able to aggregate useful forces for the reconstruction, ensuring all full autonomy of expression, since it was accompanied by the monthly "sheet of Rebuild", addressed to a reader base that was larger and more popular.

The "system of two centers", due to which the seats of the new university were ordered, foresaw a settlement in the old part of the city (first Palazzo Antonini) and an "external university area" (former cotton mill). Forecasts and assessments of the PUR, which in the disastered area would not have any sense, were recalled in the quantification of the student population and the university building requirements to demonstrate its already indicated willingness to pursue in perfect continuity the social and economic development that the years before the earthquake had set.

Placed in the city of Udine, the new institution devoted itself to the urgent problems of the territory. In fact a large part of the literature on the earthquake derives from the Friuli academic production.

Positively represented here, the theme of continuity concerns from another perspective the collapse of the mountain that at first was slowed and muffled by the building restoration and by the construction of routs along the river Fella, but later it was abandoned to its previous fate of decline, it did not fit because with the widespread industrialization of the most progressive Friuli.

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