Civita d'Antino

The plateau at 904 meters sits above the Roveto valley with the Liri running below it, and the natural rock barrier that rings the village is the same wall that once enclosed the Marsi town whose Latin name, Antinum, Pliny recorded. The inscriptions built into the modern walls are the physical continuity between the ancient settlement and the village that stands on it now: one place, occupied and rebuilt on itself for centuries rather than abandoned and resettled elsewhere.

The Scandinavian colony that formed here from 1883 was not incidental to the setting. The painters came for the light over the valley and stayed because the plateau offered the same view, session after session, for thirty years. The painter behind the colony had been noticed by Gabriele D'Annunzio at his school in Venice in 1895, a decade into its run. The 1915 Marsica earthquake ended it in a single day. What is left is a village whose Roman fragments and painters' colony both depend on the same geography: a defensible height above a valley, isolated enough to hold a community, whether Marsi or Danish, for as long as circumstance allowed.