Avezzano

Where the geometric fields of the Fucino now stretch there was once Italy's third-largest lake, after Garda and Maggiore. Draining it was the obsession of two ages: the emperor Claudius put into it, between 41 and 52 AD, over twenty-five thousand men, thirty-two vertical shafts and six kilometres of tunnel, and when Rome fell the conduits clogged and the lake came back. Alessandro Torlonia reopened that same Roman work and finished it between 1855 and 1876, handing the Marsica more than fourteen thousand hectares of fertile plain and Avezzano its destiny as a capital. The tunnels of Claudius can still be visited.

The name, by contrast, comes from a landlord: Avidianum was the estate of the gens Avidia, and a funerary altar found close by still carries the name — the romantic guess of «Ave Jane», the greeting to the god Janus, stands up to no evidence at all. On 13 January 1915 the Marsica earthquake levelled the town just before eight in the morning: over ten thousand dead in Avezzano alone. Rebuilt, it was destroyed again, more than two thirds of it, by the bombing of 1944. It is no accident that Palazzo Torlonia bears the arms of the principality of the Fucino, with the phoenix on its pyre. Today the plain also hosts one of Europe's largest space centres: from potato fields to satellites, without losing the Marsican accent.