Il lungo lago di Trevignano Romano

Trevignano Romano lives facing its lake. Along the northern shore of Lake Bracciano, a tree-lined promenade extends for about three kilometres past the old harbour: a circular medieval tower still stands at the waterline where the town's walls once ended.

Why it matters

The lungolago is a civic space in Trevignano Romano, where the historic town and its ruined castle rise above the volcanic lake basin.

What to notice

A circular tower stands between the harbour piazza and the historic centre. It is the last surviving round tower of the medieval walls, which once extended into the lake before the shoreline shifted. The streets of the borgo gather around the church of Santa Maria Assunta, with the Rocca's ruins above. The lake basin reflects its volcanic origin: the park authority records Bracciano as a caldera lake of volcano-tectonic origin, the second largest in Lazio at fifty-seven square kilometres, with a maximum depth of one hundred and sixty-five metres, so deep and clean that it still feeds an aqueduct to Rome.

Context and history

Trevignano's shoreline reflects a long history. The lake filled a depression created by the collapse of a magma chamber some three hundred thousand years ago, as the park authority explains, and was known to the Romans as Lacus Sabatinus; the aqueduct built under Trajan in the early second century still carries lake water to the Gianicolo in Rome. The town that grew on this northern bank was walled in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the promenade now passes where the lake-side arm of those walls ended in a round tower. In the modern era the water's edge became a public space along the shore. The wetland of Le Pantane, a birdwatching refuge at the town's edge, extends the same shore ecosystem that the promenade displays in its most cultivated form.