page_title: Avezzano
section_title: Geography
hierarchical_section_title: Avezzano / Geography
caption_attribution_description: The light tan oval in this image is the floor of a lake in central Italy that has been drained by a tunnel dug through the surrounding hills. Numerous rectangular fields occupy the former lake bottom—now one of the most fertile regions of Italy. The area is still referred to as “Fucine Lake,” even though the lake has been dry for nearly 150 years. The town of Avezzano (top right), near the drainage outlet of the basin, lies 80 kilometers east of Rome. The “circumference road” runs around the edge of the former lake; it roughly follows the boundary between green, vegetated fields around the basin and tan fallow fields within. This recent astronaut photograph shows a dusting of snow along mountain ridges to the south (upper and lower left). The basin of Fucine Lake has no natural outlet. Consequently the level of the original lake fluctuated widely with any higher-than-average rainfall. In Roman times, this variability caused flooding of the fishing communities around the lake. (Some of these towns, with their distinctive red tile roofs, are located around the margin of the lake floor.) Emperors Claudius and Hadrian achieved limited draining of the original lake—to control both flooding and malaria—by digging and then expanding a tunnel through the hills near Avezzano at the top of the image. Claudius used 30,000 workers over a span of ten years to dig the 5.6-kilometer-long tunnel. This engineering work reduced the size of the lake from an original area of about 140 square kilometers to about 57 square kilometers. After the Roman Empire collapsed and maintenance failed, the tunnel was blocked up with vegetation and sediment. An earthquake—possibly the same event that damaged the Coliseum, somewhat before 508 CE—dropped the lake bottom by 30-35 centimeters. Drainage slowed, and the lake expanded; water filled the basin for the next 1,000 years. A serious draining effort was commissioned by Prince Alessandro Torlonia in 1862. That effort achieved complete emptying of the lake, giving it the modern appearance.
context_page_description: Avezzano is a city and comune with a population of about 42,500 inhabitants, situated in the Abruzzo region, province of L'Aquila, Italy. It is the second most populous municipality in the province and the sixth in the region. Avezzano was documented as an existing urban center in the ninth century. The city was destroyed by the earthquake of 1915. It was rebuilt after the 1944 Allied bombing. The city was decorated with the silver medal for civil merit, an award granted by the Italian Republic.
  It is the main commercial, industrial and agricultural centre of the Marsica area, with important high-tech industries and a large Telespazio satellite farm.
context_section_description: The city is located north-west of the Fucino. It is dominated in the north by Mount Velino and west by Mount Salviano. Avezzano is considered "the city territory" of Marsica, Abruzzo sub-region that includes 37 municipalities, for a total of about 134,000 inhabitants. 
  The city is located about 100 kilometers east of Rome, 110 km west of Pescara and 55 km south of L'Aquila.
caption: Avezzano (top right) and the Fucino plain
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