Overview
If you are visiting Teramo, be sure to make a stop at the river park too. This is the city's green lounge, where the long-forgotten Tordino has returned to center stage.
Though small and identifiable, the river characterizes the provincial capital and defines both its topographical layout and urban expansion and its name, which according to many scholars means "between rivers" (inter amnes).
The other rio is its tiny tributary, the Vezzola. Both of them encircle the historic centre and the citizens walk along its banks equipped for games, sports, biking and walking, thanks to a bicycle and pedestrian path that is about 10 kilometres long. A small ancient world, which unfolds step by step, pedal by pedal, among oak and manna ash trees, maples, black hornbeams and locust trees, intertwined with poplars and willows, dogwoods and hawthorns.
The Tordino seems slender and motionless to you, yet it has a mountain energy that it manifests in its birth, which is at an altitude of 2,000 metres (where it springs up on the peaks of the Laga Mountains, between Gorzano - the highest peak - and Pelone).
It begins its approximately 59-kilometre run eastward with its torrential waters and, near the springs, it expresses its gentle impetuosity with the Fiumata Falls and, a little later, with the homonymous waterfalls.
At the hamlet of Macchiatornella, it makes a great arc ascending to the north and circumventing the Bilanciere mountain chain and continues toward the Adriatic with a short course perpendicular to the mountain range of its origin. After Teramo, where it receives the Vezzola on the left, it continues its relentless course in a wide and almost flat valley to its outlet, at the south of Giulianova.