Winter Resia lake from above

A picturesque body of water framed by snowcapped mountains, Lake Resia might strike the casual viewer as a beautiful scene typical to northern Italy. But one structure belies the lake’s strange history: a 14th-century bell tower that bizarrely juts out of the water’s blue-green depths. The steeple hints at what lies beneath the surface: namely, Curon, an Italian village that was flooded by the government in 1950 to create an artificial lake.