Cascata delle Marmore

Interesting facts

The tallest of the three drops plunges more than 80 metres, about half the waterfall's full height.

The Galleto power station, which takes most of the river's water, opened in 1929 and has a capacity of roughly 530 megawatts.

According to local legend, the falls are the nymph Nera and the shepherd Velino, lovers whom the gods turned into rivers forever joined at this spot.

The 1545 canal by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger worked for only about fifty years before a new solution was needed.

Giovanni Fontana, who designed the 1598 regulating sluice, was the brother of Domenico Fontana, one of the leading architects of papal Rome.

Galileo, Corot and J. M. W. Turner were among the visitors, and the falls became a regular day trip on the Grand Tour to Rome.

Some art historians identify the falls in an early landscape drawing by Leonardo da Vinci in the Uffizi, though the theory remains disputed.

For the 150th anniversary of Italian unification in 2011, each of the three leaps was lit in one colour of the national flag.

Over the centuries the water has carved caves with stalactites and stalagmites into the travertine beside the falls, some of which can be visited.

The Terni-born soprano Gina Palmucci took the stage name Nera Marmora in homage to the river and the falls.

Why it is worth it

The Marmore Falls near Terni in Umbria drop 165 metres in three great leaps from the lip of the Rieti plateau into the gorge of the Nera, the highest man-made waterfall in Europe. They are also man-made. In 271 BC the Roman consul Manius Curius Dentatus had a channel cut to drain the marshes of the Velino valley around Rieti, sending the river over the cliff at Marmore instead. The solution created a long quarrel: every flood of the Velino now threatened Terni downstream, and in 54 BC Cicero argued the case of the people of Rieti before a Roman commission.

The story continued for nearly two thousand years. After the fall of Rome the channel silted up and the marshes returned. Pope Gregory XII had a new cut dug in 1422; Paul III commissioned Antonio da Sangallo the Younger to open another in 1545; and in 1598 Clement VIII inaugurated a widened channel with a regulating sluice designed by Giovanni Fontana. The present shape of the falls dates from 1787, when the architect Andrea Vici reshaped the lower leaps for Pius VI and finally tamed the floods. Byron gave the falls several stanzas of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.

Since the late nineteenth century the water has also driven industry. It powered the Terni steelworks from 1896, and today most of the Velino is normally diverted to the Galleto hydroelectric plant, with Lake Piediluco above serving as its reservoir. The falls therefore run to a timetable. When the sluices open, a siren sounds, and within minutes a thin trickle over bare rock swells into a roaring white column that fills the gorge with spray. Paths climb through the park between a lower and an upper viewpoint, passing a tunnel to a balcony right beside the falls, travertine grottoes and damp woods rich in mosses and ferns, where dippers and grey wagtails feed along the river. At night the falls are floodlit.

Getting there

The falls are about 7 km east of Terni. The lower viewpoint is on the SS209 Valnerina road, with buses from Terni railway station; the upper viewpoint is near the village of Marmore, which has a small station on the Terni–L'Aquila line. The nearest airport is Perugia San Francesco d'Assisi – Umbria International (PEG), about 63 km away.

Cascata delle Marmore

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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