Identifier: inabruzzi00macdrich (find matches)
Title: In the Abruzzi
Year: 1908 (1900s)
Authors: Macdonell, Anne Atkinson, Amy, ill
Subjects: Abruzzo (Italy) -- Description and travel
Publisher: London : Chatto & Windus
Contributing Library: University of California Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

View Book Page: Book Viewer
About This Book: Catalog Entry
View All Images: All Images From Book
Click here to view book online to see this illustration in context in a browseable online version of this book.

Text Appearing Before Image:
irthem up in the name of their old gods, their oldmemories, and thirty years of training and schooling willpass from them like a frail and tattered garment. . . .Add a great many more bizarre and original character-istics, and you have Tagliacozzo, whose name is hardlyknown save as that of a battle of long ago—which wasnot fought here at all, but over yonder to the east, byScurcola, full six miles away. Look up at the place from the green below to under-stand the name. Tagliacozzo is Talus cotmm, the cleav-age of the rocks. Some great cataclysm rent the hill-side asunder from peak to plain. The left-hand portionhas been little built on. Only a few lines of housesstraggle up to the ledge where are what are called thesources of the Imele—though the little river rises farbehind among the mountains. Every place has its pointof local pride ; and it is here the Tagliacozzesi wouldlike to lead you, to sit in a cave amid the spray andwatch the water in the pools outside, or see it rushing
Text Appearing After Image:
c NNO U < < CH. VIII.) TAGLIACOZZO 147 past over the stones to work the little mills on the wayto the lower town. So fine a place do they think it,that the fancifully minded have dreamt of it as the hauntof the gayest of the Muses, and have read their town asThali(E othim, Thalias rest! But there in front of youis the great cleft of the rocks that plainly gave the placeits name. The town clusters about the right-hand rock, becauseone of the arteries of the Valerian Way ran down there,to join the main road at Scurcola. Probably the placedid not exist at the time of the Samnite wars, but sprangout of the ruin of Carsioli, destroyed, or reduced to acolony for its resistance to Rome, about B.C. 300. Therefugees fled eastwards to a spot where they could over-look the plain, to the Place of the Cleft. And when theValerian Way was cut down here, other hamlets in theneighbourhood were gradually deserted, and their inhabi-tants amalgamated with the exiles from Carsioli, to benear the new

Note About Images