entry Mar 16, 2016
A Lovely Lake, a Floating
Isle
You can pick up the jug of wine and loaf of
bread in town, namely the town of Posta Fibreno in the
province of Frosinone in the Lazio region, not far
from the Abruzzo National Park in the hills high above
to the east. Posta Fibreno is 100 km (60 mi) east of Rome
and about 30 km (19 mi) east of Frosinone. It has a
population of about 1,500 and an area of 9 sq km (3.5 sq
mi). The town is on the shores of Lake Posta Fibreno,
now a protected nature reserve (image, below).
The lake is at 288
meters (865 feet) and is elongated and shaped like a
letter in an unknown alphabet, which is why they call
it a “river-lake.” It is both. The lake is really the
beginning of the short Fibreno river. The river leaves
the lake (from the end you see in the photo, above)
and joins the Liri river about ten km further on (just
right of dead center on the map) and together they
later form the border of the Lazio and Campania
regions of Italy and, rebaptized the
Garigliano river, gurgle happily down into the
Tyrrhenian Sea.
The lake, itself, is in karst terrain;
that is, rich in caves and underwater springs. This
map (above) of the hydrographic basin of the
Garligliano shows the general network of "blood
vessels" as they flow down the western side of the
Apennines from
NW to SE from Abruzzo into the Liri valley,
but the map doesn't begin to show the underlying
"capillary system" that feeds this entire part of the
mountains to give us little pleasures such as Lake Posta Fibreno.
The icon of the lake is
the "wheel" —perhaps
more like a mascot because it really moves. It's a
floating island, 30 meters in diameter and about 4
meters thick, essentially a thick mat solidly held
together by, and made up of (among other vegetation), creeping stems
(called rhizomes), peat, marsh grasses, types of angiosperms such as pond
weed, perennially flowering plants such as nasturtium,
and the roots of shrubs (which are really trees, but
they don't get any larger than what you see here. This
thing parades back and forth in its enclosure, moved
by the winds and by the movement of water flowing in
and pushing from below. You don't need time-lapse
photography, either; you can stand there and watch it
move. It's been doing that for quite a while, too.
Pliny the Elder wrote about in his Naturalis
Historia in 77 AD. (The Latin is kind of
difficult to work out, but roughly he says, "Well,
I'll be a sonuva...that
thing just moved!") And locals have legends —centuries old— about what
really makes it move around, and
it's not the wind or the flowing water. It's something else, but they
won't talk about it. They just grow morose and get all
nervous and start looking at the heavens, and one
tribal elder who once studied English literature
long ago in faraway Naples starts whispering "...and
still of a winter's night, they say, when the wind
is in the trees, and the moon is a ghostly galleon
tossed upon stormy seas...!" and reaches for
that jug of wine I mentioned earlier.
But the same
locals take an active part in the life of the nature
reserve and do a
good job
at handling visitors. They take pride in
restoring their traditional
oaken boats to pole or paddle around (pictured) —tiny
things that they insist on calling navi (ships!); the boats are the
sole descendants in Italy of those used by
the Samnites before the age of the Roman
Empire. You, too, can go for a ride. The protected area of
the nature reserve goes back to 1983. That period
seems to have been the watershed in Italy, when
dozens of nature reserves sprung up to protect the
natural treasures that abound in the nation, some
run by the World
Wildlife Foundation, others by regional or
provincial administrations. This, after years
of frenzied and callous re-and overbuilding
after WWII, which included the builders from
Frosinone coming up to this lake in the 1960s to
dump surplus
construction waste materials into the water. That
time is past and it's a good sign. As with all of
these protected reserves, there is a
treasure of protected flora and fauna in and around
the lake but also in this particular case, a number of
species of vegetation that have almost
disappeared elsewhere, such as hippuris
vulgaris, the aquatic plant known as
Mare's
Tail.
Underwater
vegetation is also varied and inviting...so
if you are a scuba diver... As I say,
it's a good sign.
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