Bussi sul Tirino

The Tirino rises from the Campo Imperatore aquifer, runs twenty-five kilometres underground and comes back to the light in three springs: its name indeed comes from a Greek word meaning triple spring. It carries about six thousand litres a second, at a constant eleven degrees. The name of the village, instead, probably comes from box, the Latin buxus; outside the built-up area there survives a Lombard watchtower on a triangular plan, and the castle of Buxio appears in 1111 as the outer boundary of the lands of the abbey of San Clemente a Casauria. In 1889 the municipality added sul Tirino to its name to avoid confusion with other places, though everyone still says simply Bussi.

So much water brought industry. In the early nineteen hundreds the hydroelectric plant was designed, and in 1901 the chemical works of Bussi were inaugurated. Under fascism the site was turned over to the production of chemical weapons: it was from here that came the yperite and diphosgene used in the war in Abyssinia, in breach of the Geneva protocol of 1925. What remains of those works lies today inside a national remediation site covering ten hectares. The river that gave the village its name also gave it a century of factory work, and the bill.