L'Aquila Geography & Climate

L'Aquila sits in a high intermontane basin, and everything about it — the climate, the architecture, the earthquakes — follows from that.

The basin

The city stands on a spur above the Aterno river in a broad valley ringed by mountains, at around 714 metres. It is one of a chain of such basins running down the central Apennines, each formed by faulting and floored with the sediments of a lake that drained long ago.

Gran Sasso

North of the city the Gran Sasso d'Italia rises to 2,912 metres at Corno Grande, the highest point in the Apennines. On its northern flank lies the Calderone, until recently the southernmost glacier in Europe and now reduced to a remnant ice patch — one of the clearest local markers of a warming climate.

Campo Imperatore

Behind the main ridge opens a high plateau of around 75 square kilometres at 1,500 to 1,900 metres, treeless, grazed by sheep and horses, and known locally as Little Tibet. It is used for skiing, for astronomy and, for decades, for filming.

Under the mountain

Beneath the Gran Sasso, reached through the motorway tunnel, are the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso — the largest underground physics laboratory in the world. Fourteen hundred metres of rock overhead screen out cosmic rays, which is what makes it possible to look for neutrinos and dark matter there. It is an odd and rather wonderful thing to have under a national park.

Why it shakes

The Apennines are being pulled apart along their length, and the normal faults that create these basins are what produce the earthquakes. L'Aquila sits on one. The 2009 event was the latest in a documented sequence including 1315, 1349, 1461 and 1703, the last of which killed thousands.

L'Aquila has one of the coldest climates of any Italian regional capital, which surprises people who think of Abruzzo as a beach region.

Winter

Winter is genuinely cold. January highs are around 8°C and nights routinely fall below freezing; snow falls most years in the city and lies for months on the Gran Sasso. Campo Imperatore, half an hour up, is a ski area. The basin also traps cold air, so L'Aquila can be several degrees colder than places at similar altitude nearby.

Summer

July and August are warm and dry, with highs usually between 28 and 31°C, but the altitude means the nights cool off sharply — often to the low teens. It is among the more comfortable places in central Italy in August, and it is where Romans have long gone to escape the heat.

Rain

Around 700 millimetres a year, spread more evenly than on the coast, with autumn the wettest season and summer thunderstorms over the mountains common.

Spring and autumn

May, June, September and October are the best months, with the high plateau green in early summer and the beech woods turning in October.

Why summer works here

The practical consequence is worth stating: while the Adriatic coast an hour away is humid and heavy in August, L'Aquila is dry and cools off at night. Romans and Neapolitans have used these mountains as a summer refuge for well over a century, and the hill villages around the basin fill in August with families who have kept houses there.

Mountain weather

On the Gran Sasso conditions change fast and snow can fall in any month above 2,000 metres.