Labro

The village sits on the Lazio side of the Umbrian border, its stone houses climbing a slope that faces east over Lake Piediluco and the Reatini mountains. The name descends from the family that has held the central castle for more than a thousand years, an unbroken tenure from a royal grant to the present owners' later dynastic name. That family shaped the top of the village around the castle and the church below it; the rest of the centro storico, some twelve hectares of stone houses, fell empty by the 1960s.

The Belgian architect who began buying and restoring those houses did so with his wife, and the project passed to his children, who still own and run much of the centro. Two families, one holding the summit since the tenth century and one rebuilding the slope since the twentieth, account for nearly all of the village that stands today. Labro survived depopulation not by chance but by becoming, in effect, two long private restorations laid one above the other.