Fonti del Clitunno

Willows, poplars and emerald water characterize the Clitunno springs praised by Virgil, who wrote of bulls turned whiter by bathing here. Rearranged as a romantic water garden by Count Paolo Campello della Spina in the 1860s, the small park still carries the calm of classical Umbria at its clearest.

Why it matters

The springs of the Clitunno were a sanctuary of the river god in antiquity: Propertius and Virgil praised them, Virgil recording the legend of bulls that emerged from the water whiter than before, and Emperor Caligula is reported to have attended the Sacra Clitumnalia, the spring festivals held in the god's honour. Pliny the Younger, in a famous letter, described a river so abundant it was navigable, lined with shrines and villas, and urged a friend to visit — he had seen the springs late, he wrote, and regretted the delay. After an earthquake in late antiquity redistributed the veins and shortened the river, the site passed from sanctuary to farm land, then back into poetry through Byron and Giosuè Carducci, whose ode to the Clitunno is among the most famous of his "Odi barbare".

What to notice

The small lake is fed by springs rising through fissures in the lakebed. Aquatic plants include moss, water horsetail, watercress and marsh forget-me-not. Weeping willows and poplars give the water garden its distinctive silhouette, while swans, waterfowl and fish inhabit the shallows. The nineteenth-century English-style composition overlays what was once a sacred landscape.

Context and history

The present layout is surprisingly young. Between 1860 and 1865 Count Paolo Campello della Spina, head of the family that had held Campello Alto since the tenth century, formed the small lake and planted the trees that still define the site. Poetry kept arriving: Carducci, in Umbria as an exam commissioner, visited the springs and wrote his ode celebrating the pagan river against the Christian centuries; a monument with reliefs by Leonardo Bistolfi and an epigraph by Ugo Ojetti commemorates that connection. Byron also honoured the river in verse, and painters of the Romantic generation, including Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, found subjects on its banks. The surrounding wetland is protected as a Site of Community Interest for its flora and fauna.