Qualla: Ariccia Lightning https://qualla.com/ariccia-lightning en-us © 2026 Bendyline Mon, 27 Jul 2026 10:40:08 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_res/siteimages/rsslogo.png Qualla: Ariccia Lightning https://qualla.com/ariccia-lightning Ariccia Lightning: Introduction https://qualla.com/ariccia-lightning/ There is a moment in James Frazer's The Golden Bough - the book that more or less invented the modern study of myth - where the whole twelve-volume edifice begins. Frazer asks the reader to imagine a man pacing a sacred grove on the shore of an Italian lake, sword drawn, watching the trees. He is a priest. He is also a murderer. He killed the priest who came before him, and one day another man will come out of those trees and kill him. That grove was at Ariccia, above the crater lake of Nemi, in the volcanic hills the Romans called the Alban Mount.

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]]> Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/r/2/t/ariccia-lightning-wk/sr2t-ariccia-lightning-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Ariccia Lightning: The Lake That Was a Mirror https://qualla.com/ariccia-lightning/ Lake Nemi sits in the throat of an extinct volcano twenty-five kilometers southeast of Rome. The crater walls rise three hundred meters above water so still and so dark that the Romans called it speculum Dianae - the mirror of Diana. The grove of Diana Nemorensis ran along the no...

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]]> Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/r/2/t/ariccia-lightning-wk/sr2t-ariccia-lightning-the-lake-that-was-a-mirror.mp3 0:06 2 full Ariccia Lightning: The King of the Wood https://qualla.com/ariccia-lightning/ In the heart of the sacred grove stood a particular oak. No one was permitted to break a branch from it - except, by ancient rule, a runaway slave. If he managed to snap off a single golden bough, he earned the right to fight the grove's priest, the Rex Nemorensis, the King of th...

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]]> Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/r/2/t/ariccia-lightning-wk/sr2t-ariccia-lightning-the-king-of-the-wood.mp3 0:06 3 full Ariccia Lightning: Lightning and the Oak https://qualla.com/ariccia-lightning/ The grove's tutelary tree was the oak, and the oak in ancient Italy belonged to the lightning gods - Jupiter Latiaris on the mountain above, and through him to the older sky powers. To be struck by lightning was to be touched by the divine, which is why fulgurites and lightning-b...

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]]> Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/r/2/t/ariccia-lightning-wk/sr2t-ariccia-lightning-lightning-and-the-oak.mp3 0:06 4 full Ariccia Lightning: The Town on the Rim https://qualla.com/ariccia-lightning/ Ariccia kept its small reputation through the centuries that followed. The Via Appia ran through the town, and travelers leaving Rome stopped here for the night before the long descent toward Naples. Pope Alexander VII of the Chigi family loved the place and brought Gian Lorenzo ...

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]]> Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/r/2/t/ariccia-lightning-wk/sr2t-ariccia-lightning-the-town-on-the-rim.mp3 0:06 5 full Ariccia Lightning: What Survives https://qualla.com/ariccia-lightning/ The grove is gone. Centuries of woodcutting, then the Roman drainage of Lake Nemi's sister lake for fish, then in 1944 the deliberate destruction by retreating German forces, who blew up Mussolini's drained-out hangar and burned the salvaged remains of Caligula's barges. Foundati...

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]]> Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/r/2/t/ariccia-lightning-wk/sr2t-ariccia-lightning-what-survives.mp3 0:06 6 full