Monday, August 25, 2008

Celano

The next stop -- Celano, with its pretty 16-th century castle: Castello Piccolomini http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castello_Piccolomini_(Celano).
Picnic lunch in a little park by the castle.



The castle is almost completely restored after the 1915 earthquake and decades of neglect.



There are several exhibits inside, including the one on the history of Lake Fucino (http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lago_del_Fucino). In Julius Cesar time, the Romans built a complicated 5 km tunnel to control the floods caused by the lake and to free some land for cultivation. It sort of worked... for a few centuries. Finally, in the middle of the 19-th century, an Italian banker Alessandro Torlonia purchased controlling shares in the company set up to deal with the lake and ended up draining it completely.



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1 comment:

K&M said...

The attempt to create a tunnel to Lake Fucino is the subject of my favorite passage from the Roman historian Tacitus, whom we read in Directed Studies.
(do a Google Books search on Tacitus' Annals of Imperial Rome and see page 277, or search within the book for "tunnel"...)