The bioclimatic metamorphoses of the resilient landscape of Lake Fucino

The experience of natural phenomena related to climate change involves changing modes and elements closely related to landscape and urban-architectural transmutations. Changes related to the climate sphere, are by definition, associated to anthropogenic practices of planetary exploitation effecting and altering the natural balance of the global ecosystem. The paper emphasizes the main role that landscape undertakes in the process of analysis, interpretation, and configuration of the new habitats of change, establishing a mutual and constant link. Consequently, the landscape that is a terrain of dynamic relationships, both visible and invisible, generates scenarios of climatic and environmental modifications involving multiple aspects: perceptual, economic, social and identity. The survey proposes an interpretive and reconstructive analysis of a unified vision of the Abruzzi landscape of lake Fucino, a protagonist over the centuries of massive physical, landscape and climatic metamorphoses. The landscape of the floodplain was influenced by the course of the seasons in which it irregularly underwent outgrowths and decreases, as it lacked a natural outflow. The regulation of water runoff relied on the presence of natural sinkholes that were unable to counteract the magnitude of the effects due to weather events responsible for the damage of flooding of rural land and urban centers around the perimeter of the lake. It should be emphasized that works for draining the lacustrine waters that occurred through the construction of an outfall, lasted for many centuries - initiated in 41 A.D. by the Roman emperor Claudius and completed, only, in 1875 by Prince Alexander Torlonia. The outfall allowed the resolution of the problem of management and regulation of the lake water regime and flow by allowing the outflow of the basin waters into the Liri River. This has however, caused a transformation of the habitat and climate and the loss of Mediterranean biodiversity. The analysis is based, on a two-pronged approach: iconographic reading of past representations and surveys of the landscape through a comparison before and after implementation of the engineered water works, and a prognosis of the current landscape in relation to climate crisis.