The contrast between the historic centre of Gemona and the suburb on the other side of the Pontebbana railway, running down into the plain is repeated in the case of Venzone, whose inhabitants have settled in and outside the walls. The diversity between the ancient philological reconstruction of the city, realized through a strict detailed urban planning, and the heterogeneous periphery is all too obvious. As the fact recurs constantly – yet with variants that individual locations have suggested - it is necessary to recall the tragedy of everyday life and the convulsive stages of the post-earthquake, so to imagine how the complex of individual construction projects, which were directly authorized, have preceded the subsequent more orderly and fully thought through planned urban developments.

The distinction – still nowadays immediately evident - has its origin mainly in the different ways in which the demands of the earthquake victims were approached and satisfied.

In 1976 the industrial buildings that dominated the Osoppo plain and the last moraine hills indicated the innovative advances that the Friuli economy had achieved and that that seismic events of May called into question. The Snaidero kitchen factory, which resisted the earthquake, remaining virtually intact, urgently had to find accommodation for its workers. The Fantoni furniture factory instead, severely damaged by the earthquake, had decided without delay the repair and upgrading of its productive activity. The same attitude was typified on by the Pittini steel factory, which was far less damage. The Gemona factory , destroyed by the earthquake, on 11 December 1976 begann the reconstruction of the company, while the employees at Udine and Pordenone were recovering part of the machinery. Burned by the Austrians in 1918, bombed by the Allies in 1945, it sprang up anew with the same determination as on previous occasions.

The first heroic moment of reconstruction was marked by the alliance between employers and workers, together determined to keep on-site the industrial production, to resume and increase the recently started modernization. Statistics confirm the results obtained from the leading companies and the artisan businesses in the period when the majority of workers and factory hands were still homeless or precariously housed. The statistical data in this respect are clear: within the first year following the earthquake more than 90% of the 450 damaged factories had resumed business. Employment in the industrial sector in 1978 exceeded pre-quake levels.

The will to live near the factories kept reconstruction and development united. The "where it was, as it was" principle first of all accelerated the construction of modern houses. Restarting the preexisting meant supporting growing businesses and improving their living conditions at the same time. Politicians and public opinion - not without open comparisons - were conscious interpreters of this inherent social boost.

The case of Osoppo in the context of the valley – looking at homes - is a particular one: the village of prefabricated housing of which still the traces are styill visible, was replaced by an urban intervention on the destroyed centre, which was carried out following a detailed plan that gave an unusual stylistic unity to the town. The very heavy destruction and severe seismic risk explain the exception, but the times and the ways in which the fortress was later recovered respect the framework of the rapid housing recovery in support of industrial production, the slower and more historically scrupolous restoration of the original landscape. Even in Osoppo, stables and aylofts disappeared. Today the chipped wall of a "Braida", the historical walled estate, borders the Osoppo road and keeps intact the memory of the traditional way of life.

By decentralizing the tasks of reconstruction and choosing to restart on the same location and with the same people the development already undertaken before 1976, it allowed the first recovery of the territory. Ten years later, almost all the wounds inflicted by the earthquake were healed, while further goals were set in terms of modernization of infrastructure, such as roads, railways, universities, research centers.

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