Ortucchio

Before the lake was drained, Ortucchio was a small island at the south-eastern corner of the Fucino, and its boundaries were never clearly drawn, because the water rose and fell. The humanist Pietro Marso compared it to Ortygia, the island of Syracuse, and in the Middle Ages the place really was called Ortygia. Living on a shifting shore meant floods, and in 1807 the townspeople appealed to Joseph Bonaparte to move the village further uphill, out of reach of the water. He was moved by the appeal and promised to do it — with the wish that the village should then be renamed Giuseppopoli. It was never moved, and it kept its own name.

In the second half of the nineteenth century Alessandro Torlonia turned the Fucino, until then the third largest lake in Italy, into a plain, enlarging the tunnels the Romans had dug under Claudius; and the house of Torlonia was declared owner of the land that emerged, for almost a century, against the will of the comuni on the shore. It took the peasant struggles and the agrarian reform of 1950 to expropriate them. Meanwhile the Marsica earthquake of 1915 had killed about one thousand two hundred people here, out of a little more than two thousand five hundred inhabitants: the church of Sant'Orante and the Piccolomini castle were wrecked, and the village was rebuilt in the course of the twentieth century. Older than all of it are the caves in the mountainside above, which have given the archaeologists a great deal, and the legend of Archippe, the city the lake is said to have swallowed, which three historians placed between here and Trasacco. The town hall, finally, stands in a square named after Alfred Zampa, who went from here to build bridges in the United States.