Balsorano

Balsorano sits along the Liri river at the southern edge of Marsica, first documented in the 10th century. Through the Middle Ages and into the early modern period it was held by the Piccolomini barons, whose fortress still stands on the ridge above the town. The valley running south from it toward Lazio is the lower stretch of a longer stretch of river country, its floor given over to chestnuts and olives and crossed by the highway that follows the water south.

The town itself is really two places. The old village, gathered below the castle since the Middle Ages, was flattened by the 1915 earthquake and left as ruins on the slope. What functions as Balsorano today was built a kilometer north afterward, a plain reconstruction with none of the older settlement's history. The castle above them both survived the quake that leveled everything around it, which is the plainest fact about the place: the fortress outlasted the town it once ruled, and the town that replaced the old one had to start over at a distance from where the barons had put it.