Fondi

An empress was born at Fondi. Livia Drusilla, Augustus's second wife and Tiberius's mother, came from here: Suetonius says so, and so do several inscriptions, and it may be through her family's holdings that part of the territory ended up in the imperial demesne. The wine of these lands, the Caecubum, was praised in verse by Horace and Martial, and Pliny the Elder ranked it among the best of his time. The via Appia, begun in 312 BC, ran straight into the town: the main decumanus of the old centre is still its urban stretch, and the ancient forum is today's piazza della Collegiata. That road has recently become a World Heritage site.

In 1378, in the Caetani palace, a rebel conclave met and elected the antipope Clement VII: the Western Schism begins here, and the following year the two popes' armies would face each other at Marino. A century and a half later, in 1534, the corsair Barbarossa sacked Fondi and the town never recovered; tradition has it that he had come to carry off Giulia Gonzaga, mistress of the most celebrated court of the southern Renaissance, and that she fled in the night. A sculpture in the square was dedicated to her, «Serenade to Giulia Gonzaga»: it was stolen at the end of the seventies. What remains are the square circuit of Roman walls, the Caetani palace with its Catalan-Gothic doorways, and the Giudea of Olmo Perino with its Jewish museum. Around are the orange groves and the MOF, one of the largest fruit and vegetable markets in Europe: Fondi has always fed Rome.