Scanno

They call it the town of the photographers, and the name was earned in the field: throughout the twentieth century its alleys and its people ended up in the shots of Hilde Lotz-Bauer, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Mario Giacomelli, Renzo Tortelli, Gianni Berengo Gardin, Ferdinando Scianna, Mario Cresci. In 1964 a photograph taken here by Giacomelli, the one everyone knows as the boy of Scanno, entered the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the most famous image of the town, in short, is in Manhattan. What brought them all the way up here, a thousand metres among the Marsican mountains, was largely the women's costume: the headdress looks like a turban and the drapery has eastern colours, and local tradition traces them to the centuries of the Saracen and later Ottoman raids, when the wall of mountains that had shielded the town from the barbarian invasions was no longer enough.

At the foot of the built-up area lies the lake that bears its name, the largest natural basin in Abruzzo, and that too, strictly speaking, belongs three quarters to the neighbouring comune of Villalago. On how it was born the stories do not agree: in one there appears a mythical king of Battifolo struggling against the emperor of Rome or against the magician Pietro Baialardo, in another the lake marks the spot where a witch fell, defeated by a sorcerer. The name is disputed as well. The current explanation derives it from the Latin scamnum, a stool, because the hill of the old town looks like a little bench; more recent studies prefer that word's other meaning, the strip that divided the centuriae when the Romans assigned conquered land to their veterans, and they bring in support two inscriptions found here, dedicated to a quattuorvir and a decurion enrolled in the same tribe. From 1047 onwards the documents write it Scamnum, Scannum, Scagium, Scampium, Scandum, as though not even the scribes could make up their minds.