Lago di Pilato

The story

If you climb Monte Vettore, what you see at a certain point, hidden in a hollow among the rocks, is a dark sheet of water. It is small, but it is no ordinary lake. It is called the Lago di Pilato, Pilate's Lake, and of Pontius Pilate, they say, it keeps the body.

The story told is this, and it must be said at once that it is only a legend.

Pilate was the Roman governor who, in Judea, had condemned Jesus. Many years later, according to the legend, in Rome the emperor Vespasian had him executed. But what to do with the body?

So, they say, they loaded it on a cart. They tied it to two buffaloes and set them off. The buffaloes ran out of Rome, crossed valleys and mountains and arrived at the Monti Sibillini, and the cart plunged into the lake.

In a later version, the buffaloes themselves leapt from the sharp ridge called the Cima del Redentore, the Redeemer's Peak, and dragged everything down. Even today, they tell, on that rock you can see the furrows of the cart's wheels.

From that day, say the mountain people, the lake has not been the same, and nobody has dared call it by any other name.

There is another story, which a man named Vincenzo Ghinassi collected at the end of the nineteenth century as popular tradition. It says that on the day Jesus was crucified, the Sibyl fled from her cave, nearby. And that in that same instant the water of the lake turned red as blood. They also say that, around the lake, there grew a plant with leaves shaped like two joined hands.

From the thirteenth century onwards, the mountain had a sinister reputation. It was said that demons lived in the lake. And to those demons, at night, someone brought books.

They were the necromancers, men who practised black magic. They climbed all the way up there with books written entirely by themselves and consecrated them to the demons of the lake, dipping them in, reading formulas, seeking powers that no honest man would want. When the necromancers arrived, said the farmers, the sky clouded over. Storms broke out that swept the fields and destroyed the harvests.

The poet Fazio degli Uberti, who wrote in the fourteenth century, told in his "Dittamondo" of magicians and necromancers who climbed the mountain. And another fourteenth-century writer, Pierre Bersuire, in his "Reductorium morale", is the earliest to name that lake in writing and to link it to demons. From that moment the name of the lake began to travel from book to book, and every book added something.

Later, in 1889, a scholar, Arturo Graf, took up those stories, and wrote about them.

In 1420, or soon after, a Frenchman also climbed up, Antoine de la Sale, who wrote a book about his journey, "The Paradise of Queen Sibyl". To reach the lake he needed a safe-conduct, a written permit, issued by the authorities of Norcia. He wrote afterwards that whoever was found near the lake without a permit was received very badly. He told of two men who were caught up there, and who were killed. One of them was a priest. That was enough to make everyone understand that up there it was no joking matter, not even for those who wore the habit.

It is said that the authorities had barred the road in another way too: with a gallows, set at the entrance of the valley, to remind everyone what whoever climbed was risking. Around the water, they say, they built dry-stone walls to stop people going near. But of this there is no written proof.

There is, however, a written proof from 1452. An inquisitor, De Guardariis, of the March of Ancona, absolved the inhabitants of Montemonaco. They had been excommunicated because they accompanied foreign knights to the lake to consecrate forbidden books.

Imagine the scene: a moonless night, a hollow of stones, a man in a cloak holding a book tight to his chest and looking at the black water, wondering whether what he is about to do will change him for ever. Then, down in the valley, a farmer raises his eyes to the mountain, sees the dark clouds and understands that the harvest, this year, is lost.

For centuries, then, the lake had two faces: on one side an ancient fear, on the other the curiosity of those who wanted to see it.

Today nobody consecrates books there any more, and nobody takes you for a damned soul. Whoever climbs does so on foot, in summer, when the snow has melted, in mountain boots, with a camera in the rucksack.

And discovers that this small sheet of water hides a real thing, which no legend had foreseen.

In the water swims a tiny red crustacean, less than a finger long: from nine to twelve millimetres. It is called the Marchesoni fairy shrimp, and it has a strange habit: it swims on its back. It lives only there, in no other place, and it has never been a demon. It lays its eggs among the stones, right on the shore, and for this reason whoever arrives at the lake must stay at least five metres from the water.

The demons, at least, did not need so much care.