Ussita

A village of a few hundred people in the Sibillini has come, in some rankings, to stand among the richest comuni in Italy, and the credit belongs to water. In 1928 Cardinal Pietro Gasparri, who was born here, had a small hydroelectric station built at Vallazza, fed by the stream with a fall of barely four metres; from that first turbine descends today's plant, which gives the comune a substantial share of its income. Ussita, for that matter, has not been a comune for long: until 1913 it was a hamlet of Visso.

Then came the earthquake. Between the twenty-sixth and the twenty-seventh of October 2016 the shocks, whose epicentre was partly here, made ninety per cent of the buildings unusable, the town hall included, and brought down the front of the church; a few days later the fourteenth-century castle tower fell too, the one built into the cemetery. In the woods, along a path, an old fountain remains that they call the Ghost's: the story goes that a sleepwalking girl vanished there one night, and that the next day her face was cut into the stone.