Overview
Looking at that stream running along the Abruzzo Apennine for about 150 kilometres from west to east, the Italian poet Gabriele d'Annunzio prophesied – over a hundred years ago – the birth of a great city of which that river was to be a living and cohesive part.
Here’s today the Pescara river (generally used in the masculine form – “Il Pescara” – it turns into the feminine form in the local idiom: “la Pescara”). It’s a fluid gray-blue line, masculine and feminine, that connects the coast with the hilly and mountainous areas of the Maiella and Gran Sasso d’Italia, giving meaning and completeness to a planned city.
It is the longest river in Abruzzo and the second largest basin among those that flow into the Adriatic south of the Rhine, after the Po River.
Let’s admire its "city mouth” where – in the late 1800s – the sailors' clay and reed houses followed one another and fires were lit with sea wastes. At the centre of Pescara, the river’s mouth is arranged as a canal port, with a rediscovered and reclaimed riverfront that is a destination for relaxing sunrise, sunset and night walks to appreciate the spectacle of the illuminated coastline, boats and catamarans.
A "metropolitan" river where to enjoy a drink or aperitifs. It’s a place defined by the unforgettable writer and director Pier Paolo Pasolini as "a river of elegant, beautiful, tanned and massive people". Every year in July, “The River and Memory Festival” tells the story of the river through theater performances, concerts, film retrospectives, exhibitions and public events organised on the riverside and downtown.
On the other hand, you can discover its immaculate and silent side in the Pescara Springs Regional Nature Reserve, in Popoli (about 50 km away). Since 1986, the Reserve has been protecting the large body of crystal-clear water created by the numerous sources and underwater springs.
More than 60 springs with a water flow rate of 7,000 litres per second, which come directly from the vast Gran Sasso plateau – Campo Imperatore – after a journey lasting about 30 days, concentrating in the area of Capo Pescara. A green paradise where more than 300 floristic and 110 faunal species have been surveyed. The Reserve can be visited all year round, and by contacting the Information Point, you can get all the information for an interesting tour of the protected area.