Morino

The name most probably comes from morro, a boulder: a stony place. In the comune's territory lies the reserve of Zompo lo Schioppo, named after the waterfall — the name means the leap of the shot — which is one of the highest in the Apennines: the water comes out of a sheer limestone wall and falls more than eighty metres. Above it, at more than eleven hundred metres, there are a rock church and a hermitage, Santa Maria del Cauto, which documents attest from the twelfth century, and beside it a narrow gorge among the rocks that they call the Buco del Caùto. One of the hamlets is called Grancia because the charterhouse of Trisulti, which owned the villa of Morino, used the place as a granary. The notable families, the Ferrante and the Facchini, built a Bourbon ironworks here, and from 1841 the nuns' school was the first girls' school in the Roveto valley.

The old village stood on a hill, higher up than the valley. The Marsica earthquake of 1915 killed a hundred and thirteen people here and destroyed it completely; the few survivors abandoned it and rebuilt lower down. Of the old village there remain the ruins of the three gates, of the houses, of the palaces and of the two churches — the bell tower and the apse of Santa Maria Bambina, and San Rocco with the ossuary of its underground chapel. One thing has come down to us intact: the cisterns of palazzo Facchini, made of reinforced concrete in 1909 by a builder from Bologna, Cesare Palazzi — the same man whose house in Avezzano was the only one left standing whole after the earthquake. For the centenary, in 2015, the ruined village was made safe and given lighting.