A geological past dramatically explosive, over 1.3 million years gave shape to the entire Cimina-Viterbo region, creating the volcanic cone of Mount Cimino, the tufa plains and the caldera of Vico, that is the huge crater today home to one of the pearls of the biodiversity of Lazio: Lago di Vico.
We are in the generative fulcrum of this Tuscia area's landscape. Of course the comparison we'r about to do sounds forced, but, Vico's caldera, a place of great climatic peculiarity, a Region Lazio's treasure, full of biodiversity and, today, important natural reserve thathosts hundreds of migratory and sedentary birds, can recall, by shape (in the distant and in small) the Ngorongoro crater in Tanzania: of course, it is not teeming with lions, wildebeests, zebras and giraffes, but with history and legend! The Cimina region for centuries was the dark and impenetrable refuge for the Etruscans and Falisci, rulers, before the Romans, of this region. The wooded forest have been intimidating the Romans for centuries, they used to consider it impenetrable and they have fueled their imagination, so that the legend have permeated these mountains and these valleys. For instance: Hercules was the one who created the "lacus ciminus", during a show of strength, sticking and then extracting his cudgel from the ground and thus causing the water to spill out the hole up to the point that the valley was flooded. Finally, with the definitive conquest, the Romans took possession of the moors and woods, which, far from being immaculate and merely deified, were already well exploited by the Etruscans and the Falisci, both for timber resources, for agricultural ones, and for water: yet in Etruscan times, the lake was governed by a drainage channel, which regulated its water level and which still exists today, after being restored in the Renaissance by the Farnese family, the lords of the area. The very name "Vico", borne, as well as by the lake, by the first medieval feudal lords of the area, the Prefects of Vico, is supposed to be derived from the numerous "Vici", service settlements for the exploitation of timber and other resources, perhaps already existing in Etruscan times. The caldera of Vico is today a delicate naturalistic and landscape microcosm, a birdwatching paradise, where the integrity of the lake ecosystem is always in precarious balance, for the intensive agriculture of the hazelnut groves in the surroundings, which today has replaced the traditional pastoral use, but the heritage that remains is still valuable and unique, all to be discovered.
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