Bisegna

Bisegna stands on the spur overlooking the Giovenco valley, where the river rises, and its whole territory lies inside the Abruzzo, Lazio and Molise national park. The name is the Marsian one of Visinium, which passed through Vesennia and Versennia before reaching its present form. At the beginning of the Iron Age the people here went up onto the heights and shut themselves into fortified settlements — the ocres, with dry-stone walls, cisterns and ditches — traces of which remain on Colle Bernardo and Colle Arienzo; then, after the foedus granted to the Marsi in 302 before Christ, peace made it pointless to stay up there and the villages came back down into the valley.

That history is still in the motto of the arms, «Visinium Marsorum arx», Bisegna stronghold of the Marsi. And the arms carry a more recent history too: they were granted in 1941 with the fascist chief, which after the war was replaced by a stronghold between a branch of laurel and one of oak tied with a ribbon in the national colours. The Marsica earthquake of 1915 had meanwhile brought down the parish church, of which the clock tower is still standing. And the war here ended late: on 26 March 1946 a device left behind by the retreating Germans went off at Campomizzo while the bridge over the Giovenco was being rebuilt, and killed seven young men.