On 13 January 1915 the Marsica earthquake brought down much of the old village, and more than three hundred people died inside the parish church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo alone, full at that hour of the morning: the instruments put the shock at 7:52. From here, before that and even more afterwards, a great many left — for the north, for Mississauga in Ontario, for Cleveland, for South America and Australia — and the village ended up dedicating a monument to the emigrant. The town theatre is in the former cinema Dante, and in 2005 it was named after Nicola Calipari, the official killed in Iraq a few days earlier.
The name probably comes from circulus, the round of the first fortified enclosure, and the shape of the old centre agrees. The historians of the past, though, preferred legends: that the village was founded by the sorceress Circe, sister of Angizia, or that it grew around a circus put up by the Romans to celebrate Claudius, the first man to drain the Fucino. What is certain is that once the empire fell nobody cleaned Claudius's tunnels any more: the outlet blocked and the lake came back to where it had been. It was the banker Torlonia who drained it for good in the eighteen hundreds, and the people of Cerchio went down to work his plain as sharecroppers and day labourers. The church of San Bartolomeo is the only religious monument of the Marsica named in the document of the first jubilee, the one of 1300.
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📅 Every year, on the last Sunday of June
On the last Sunday of June Cerchio, a municipality of 1,653 inhabitants in the province of L'Aquila, celebrates its patron saints Giovanni and Paolo.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
