LIFE AROUND THE LAKE
Since its appearance in Marsica, man has had to deal with the lake and its erratic regime, which limited the possibilities of agricultural exploitation of the area, if anything, favoring hunting and fishing.
This may explain the attitude of religious fear that it could inspire. The coastal populations began to worship him as a mysterious and fearsome divinity, on which prosperity and the community could be depend life itself.
The inscriptions preserved in Parole di Pietra offer one tear of life around the lake after the final inclusion of local populations in the Roman state.
The territories around the lake were largely occupied by Marsi, which also occupied the upper Giovenco Valley and the Roveto Valley; only in the northwestern corner today occupied by Avezzano and its territory, they were allocated the Equi.
The first historical mention of the area dates back to 408 BC, when Livy (IV, 57, 7) certifies that, in the area of a war against Volsci and Equi, the Romans conquered a fortress near the Fucino (castellum ad lacum Fucinum).
At 340 BC the first explicit mention dates back instead dei Marsi (Livio, VIII, 6, 8), which then appear among the populations won by Rome during the Second War Samnite.
The alliance treaty that bound them definitively in Rome was stipulated in 304 BC. (Livio, IX, 45, 18) and renewed in 302 after an attempted rebellion (Livio X, 3, 5).
Ever since, while maintaining their own independence in exchange for a regular supply of troops, the Marsi adopted the alphabet and language of Rome and suffered the cultural influence it radiated especially from Alba Fucens, where in 303 BC had been founded a colony of Latin law (Livio, X, 1, 1).
Alba represented the grafting of a model of urban settlement in a characterized context rather from small fortified centers on the heights (oppida), which hillside villages came alongside and of the valley floor (vici).
After the great crisis of the Social War (91-89 BC), which saw the Italian allies, with the Marsi in the lead, take the weapons against Rome, even the populations around the lake received Roman citizenship and the ancients ‘national’ states were definitively incorporated in the Roman state.
The Marsica, like the other areas of the Apennines poorly urbanized central, underwent a radical transformation, because all of life administrative was reorganized on the urban model.
The territory around the Fucino was divided between three centers autonomous (municipia): Alba Fucens, who lost in this way the rank of colony, Marruvium (S. Benedetto) and Anxa Angitia (Luco), to which Antinum (Civita d’Antino) in the Roveto Valley.
The municipalities that arose in the ancient Marso area were simple villages, which from that moment on
endowed with the peculiar structures of an ancient city: forum, temples, public buildings, walls, buildings for performances.
The decline of this urban model, which is already evident between III and IV century. A.D., it will be definitively signed by loss of functionality of the ancient emissary in the end of the fifth or early sixth century. A.D.