Gioia dei Marsi

The old village was born of a union. After the Saracen raids of the tenth century the inhabitants of three villages — Templo, Campomizzo and Montagnano — decided to gather at the safest point, high up, along the roads linking Lake Fucino to the Giovenco valley and the upper Sangro; and a popular legend has it that the name comes precisely from the joy with which that decision was taken. Up there Gioia Vecchio remained for centuries. In 1592 the village was sacked by a large band of brigands led by Marco Sciarra; on the tenth of September 1807, as Benedetto Croce later also revealed, fifteen livestock owners were killed here, which unleashed a harsh repression against the pro-Bourbon rebels entrusted to a French general. From the second half of the eighteenth century, meanwhile, the people had begun to come down the valley, building around a church now vanished the new settlement of Manaforno; and in 1831 the communal seat too moved down there.

The reason this place changed so much, however, lies in something that is no longer there: the lake. The Fucino filled the basin the village looks down upon, and it was drained entirely in the second half of the nineteenth century by Alessandro Torlonia, the work officially declared complete in 1878. From one day to the next a whole economy changed trade: the fishermen became farmers and then agricultural entrepreneurs, while the villages left on the heights, like Gioia Vecchio, emptied still further in favour of the centres near the old lake bed. On that bed, a little beyond the municipal boundary, there stands today the largest teleport in the world for civil uses. To the south, the ancient beech wood of Selva Moricento has been a world heritage site since 2017, and near the Passo del Diavolo rise the springs of the Sangro.