L’Aquila Remains Unchanged

L’Aquila is one of those extraordinary heritage-cities gifted with the strength to respond to the traumas in- flicted by history. It is a resilient city. Since its particu- lar time of foundation in the mid-thirteenth century, L’Aquila has continually found the vigour to rebuild in the wake of various destructive events, not all of whi- ch were earthquakes. What “remains unchanged”, precisely, is its proactive identity: to paraphrase Virgil in his Georgics – in which, what is more, the L’Aquila- -born humanist Massonio borrows the Latin locution Immota Manet, present since the seventeenth centu- ry on the city’s coat of arms - L’Aquila is powerfully rooted to the site atop which it was founded. To com- prehend its resistant nature, we must step back in hi- story, to a time when this city did not yet exist.