people of the neighboring town of Minturnae, but appear to have enjoyed considerable celebrity with the Romans themselves. Immediately adjoining its mouth was an extensive marsh, formed probably by the stagnation of the river itself, and celebrated in history in connection with the adventures of Gaius Marius. About upstream from its mouth, the river passes what used to be Lake Fucino, separated from the lake basin by the mountain ridge of Monte Salviano. The Roman emperor Claudius had a tunnel dug through the ridge in an attempt to drain the lake, which had no natural outlet, to the Liri. The later emperor Hadrian tried to improve the tunnel but, after the fall of the empire, tunnel maintenance was not maintained and it was blocked by silt and debris, allowing the lake to refill. A new tunnel was completed in the 1860s, and the basin of the former lake still drains to the Liri via that tunnel, through the ridge near the town of Avezzano. The river, in most tracts, matched the longest lived border in Europe from the 6th century a.d when it separated the Byzantine exclave of the duchy of Rome from the Lombard duchy of Benevento until 1860-61: the year of unification of Italy when the Papal states and the kingdom of the two Sicilies were the last sovereign countries to share this border. During the Italian Campaign of the Second World War, the German defenses of the Gustav Line followed the Liri valley. References Bibliography Attribution External links Rivers of Italy Rivers of Lazio Rivers of the Province of Frosinone Rivers of the Province of L'Aquila