Beyond the Archaeological Site: The Draining of Lake Fucino and the Conservation of the Landscape System

The close connection between conservation and safeguard of the territory (anticipated by Ruskin and Viollet le Duc, who both paid attention to the Alpine landscape) appears today as an unavoidable necessity, mainly due to increas-ingly invasive anthropic actions towards an underestimated and misunderstood heritage. Leaving aside the best-known peninsular landscapes, which undergo significant transfor-mations caused by the impact of tourism, the difficulty of recognizing the numerous cultural values spread across the territory is a limit that could result in irreversible damage. Among the places whose extraordinary poten-tial appears neglected (since substantially misinterpreted as monumental ensembles), we draw particular atten-tion to the territorial context of Fucino in Abruzzo. This plateau, surrounded by mountain ranges, is a lake basin whose reclaim began in Roman times through an extraor-dinary system of tunnels dug into Salviano Mount aiming to let the water flow to the opposite side. The draining work continued throughout the nineteenth century with the “restoration” of the Roman emissary (which was enlarged to four times its original section) until the complete desic-cation of the lake. The newly exposed lands then became a new landscape of cultivated fields; the design of the reclaimed territory (crossed by canals and divided into a myriad of agricultural lands entrusted to settlers) has persisted substantially unchanged despite the agrarian reform and the abolition of the latifundium and the various production settlements that arose within it. Through historical and bibliographical research, on-site investigations, and source analysis, it was possible to reconstruct this work’s history, spanning from its origins to all of its trans-formations. The result was a clear depiction of how this infrastructure has reshaped the surrounding environment and of how, as of today, conservation criteria do not take sites like this into account. Today the archaeological park ofCunicolidiClaudio restricts access to the tunnels (which are already only partially accessible to the public) on the Fucino side, while the Incile Torlonia hosts the hydraulic management by the reclamation Consortium. However, beyond the archaeological remains, the entire territory transformed by the impressive work is not perceived as a monumental whole, thus leading to limited valoriza-tion actions and inappropriate urban planning choices. Shifting protection from isolated monumental sites to the entire landscape constitutes the foundation of systemic and integrated conservation aimed at fostering a vital territory.