Historians traditionally accept that the establishment of Ancient Rome is 753 B.C. beside the River Tiber. Others accept circa 625 B.C. Emperor Claudius built a series of canals and tunnels from 41 to 52 B.C. that linked Fucine Lake to the Liris River. This lake has an extensive and engaging history. This article will highlight parts of its history.
The ancient Romans called the lake “Fucinus Lacus” and established settlements on the lake, including Marruvium. Emperor Claudius fought the Battle of Fucine Lake in 89 B.C. against a rebel force. Lago Fucino (Italian) had flooded its surrounding settlements since people began writing about it in ancient times.
Lake Fucine Facts
Lake Fucine had no natural outlet, making it an endorheic lake. It was about 100-feet deep, and 37-miles (59 km) in circumference. However, its water level fluctuated significantly because of no outflow and when there was a higher-than-average rainfall. It was the 3rd largest lake in Italy.
Avezzano, Italy, lies on Lake Fucine’s northwestern edge about 50 miles (80 km) from Rome in the L’Aquila Province of the Abruzzo Region. Before Claudius, citizens pressured Julius Caesar to drain the lake. Emperor Caesar was not able to do so because approximately 40 of Caesar’s senators assassinated him 44 B.C.
First Attempt to Control Lake Fucine
Emperor Claudius came along with a plan in 41 B.C. for controlling Lake Lucine. Claudius’ ambitious plan involved over 30,000 workers (mostly slaves), 11 years, and digging a tunnel through mountains. The workers toiled to dig a 3.7-mile (6-km) long tunnel through the hills near Avezzano.
The mortality rate of a worker on the tunnel was high. This engineering feat claimed an unrecorded number of lives. Tunnels collapsed and landslides tumbled to bury the workers. An engineering miscalculation almost drowned Claudius and his party.
Controlling Lake Fucine was the largest engineering accomplishment of its time. The plans included a huge series of aqueducts so water could flow into Rome. Claudius’ tunnels partially diverted the lake’s water to the Liris River. The tunnel bored through the foothills of the Apennine Mountains, which end up today in the Fucino Plateau in the Fucino Basin.
In the year 52 B.C., those involved considered it time to officially open the grand project. An impressive banquet was prepared for Emperor Claudius, who had staged a magnificent sea battle on Lake Fucine. Claudius assigned 19,000 gladiators and criminals to dress up as Sicilian and Rhodesian fighters and crowded them onto his warships.
People flocked into the area from all over Italy to see the spectacular show. The staged battle was not merely a reenactment–blood spilled. Claudius has put his own soldiers in siege vessels surrounding the warships to fire heavy projectiles into the battle, which stained the lake blood red.
Claudius spared the lives of those who had managed to survive in the battle. Claudius concluded the show and announced the opening of the new waterway. Claudius did not understand that the canals were too narrow. Claudius planned a later event. The workers dammed the outlet and continued to work on the canals.
Claudius prepared another banquet on the shores and enacted an infantry fight. Another huge crowd attended, and finally Claudius opened the waterway. Rushing waters rolled towards the shoreline and the Emperor’s floating platform and nearly drowned Claudius and his party. Roman historian and politician Tacitus (56–c. 120 A.D.) reported tens of thousands of people attended the event.
The Draining of Lake Fucine
Claudius reduced Lake Fucine’s surface area from 87 square miles (140 sq. km) to less than 37 square miles (60 sq. km). After Claudius built the longest tunnel in the world at the time, the fall of the Roman Empire in the late 400s and an earthquake in the 500s eroded and collapsed the lake’s tunnels and canals.
In the 1200s and 1400s, a few unsuccessful attempts did not restore the ancient drainage system. Eighteen centuries after Claudius, Lake Fucine continued to flood the towns surrounding it. Italian prince and banker Alessandro Torlonia contracted Swiss engineer Jean François Mayor de Montricher, along with other French and Swiss engineers, to drain the lake completely.
The engineers began work in 1862 and completed the project in 1873. Lake Fucine was no longer by 1878, when it completely drained. The Torlonia family owned the reclaimed land in the lake’s basin. In 1902, the “Tunnels of Claudius” became a National Italian Monument.
Italy’s Land Reform Acts
The Italian Land Reform Acts of the late 1940s to the early 1950s expropriated and divided the Fucino Basin into small farms of about two-and-a-half acres (1 hectare). The Italian government redistributed approximately 2,500,000 (2.5) million acres during this period. Other plots ranged from five to 123 acres.
The Italian government developed these reclaimed lands all over Italy. It removed stumps and stones, installed irrigation systems, and plowed, terraced, and fertilized the reclaimed lands. It then built compact homes, barns, and equipment, and furnished livestock on the plots. These land reforms, including the Fucino Basin plots, disenfranchised the land-owning gentry of large estates.
At the end of WWII, rural southern Italian agricultural workers lived in extreme poverty. These people were protesting and especially demanding land. The Italian land reforms offered the landed gentry’s uncultivated land for sale to the impoverished rural agricultural workers.
One particular statute of the Italian Land Reform Acts, the Law Gullo, stated that the lands left uncultivated or poorly managed by their landowners had to be distributed to peasants’ cooperatives. The Italian Parliament adopted two measures to prevent fraud among the landowners.
The landowners could not split their properties with their relatives or create fake property transfers. The government compensated the landowners with 25-year fixed rate government bonds worth 33% of the property values. The new laws prevented landowners from purchasing new land for six years.
The government called the small redistributed plots a quota and the larger ones a podere. Quotas were to supplement existing incomes and poderes were to become independent farms. Quota and podere assignees had to affiliate with cooperatives. The cooperatives invested in high-cost equipment and infrastructure. This period did not last long.
Much of the land redistributed between 1944 and 1947 had been taken from the peasants and ownership was irreversible by 1949 with the approval of the “new” Agrarian Reform. Democrats had come into power with their majority in parliament and had regained the landower’s support.
This significantly limited the peasant’s right to occupy land unused or poorly managed by the landowners. In 1950, a newly approved law gave land owners the legal right to evict peasants if they had been judged and proven to misuse the land. This resulted in years of legal entanglements between the cooperatives and the landowners.
So was the fate of the Fucino Basin.
The Fucino Basin after Land Redistribution
Small-scale farmers began growing vegetables and herbs once Italy’s land reforms began to take place. Throughout the years of violence and legal battles of the Italian Land Reforms and beyond, the Fucino Basin continues to provide an exceptional microclimate. Via Circonfucense (Circumference Road) encircles Fucino Basin.
Today, this region is known as the Fucino Basin, Fucino Plain, Lago Fucino, and the Fucino Plateau. The positive attributes of the Fucino Basin are clay-silt earth, rich soils containing nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, the water retention capacity of the ground, moisture rising from beneath the original lakebed, and the temperature range during the growing season and make for lush crops.
Green, vegetated fields lie around the basin’s edge, surrounding the brown fields within the basin. The Fucino Plain is one of the most fertile vegetable growing regions in Italy and famous throughout Europe. Commercial and small growers work the fields of the Fucino Plain today.
Primary crops include cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, celery, chicory, endive, fennel, lettuce, potatoes, radishes, spinach, and tomatoes. The Fucino region also produces cereal grains, fruit, grapes, and sugar beets. Some of the Fucino growers harvest without storage facilities and deliver their products straight to the market.
Carota dell’Altopiano del Fucino
This subtitle translates to the “Carrot from the Fucino Plateau”. The Fucino carrot is famous in Europe as an essential ingredient in stews, soups and minestrones. The Fucino carrot harbors a distinctly sweet flavor, which is wonderful when eaten raw.
The Tunnels of Claudius
Today, the Cunicoli di Claudio (Tunnels of Claudius) lie at the foot of Monte Salviano, south of the city of Avezzano. The locals call them Cunicoli di Nerone (Tunnels of Nero), but they are not tunnels. It is a single tunnel. The Italian government declared Claudius’ tunnel an Italian national monument in 1902.
This tunnel is considered an archeological and speleological interest site. The Archaeological Park of Claudius was founded there in 1977. In 2017, the Chamber of Commerce of L’Aquila, the municipality of Avezzano and the GAL Terre Aquilane began developing the park. They developed the tunnel site with trails, steps, and electric lights.
The Archaeological Park of Claudius is between the Fucine Inlet and the entrances to the tunnels. The development of the park was completed in 2020. The outbreak of Covid prevented the opening of the park. There is no word when this park will open.
Visitors to the Fucino Plateau can see the drainage channel from the Incile del Fucino (Fucine Inlet), the Roman sluice gates, which controlled the outflow of water from the lake, and the ingenious hand-dug entrances to the major tunnel of Claudius.
A 23-foot statue of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary overlooks the three-arched bridge of the sluice gates at the head of the main emissary of the Fucine Lake in Borgo Incile south of Avezzano.
Photo credit: NASA ISS Crew Earth Observations experiment
