Formia

The name says the same thing twice: from the Greek Hormiai, «anchorage», for the quiet of the gulf, or from the Latin formus, «warm». Martial, who had a friend with a villa here, wrote «O temperatae dulce Formiae litus»; and it was no figure of speech. Myth, though, tells another story: this was the land of the Laestrygonians, the cannibal giants whose city Ulysses' ships reached — and only his own escaped. The gulf was called Sinus Formianus for more than two thousand years. When the Romans routed the via Appia through here, in 312 BC, it was because passage through was safe: they had already acknowledged it by granting citizenship without the vote.

Cicero had one of his favourite houses here, and here he was caught and killed by Antony's assassins as he tried to escape the proscriptions: the place where he died is called Vindicio and is now a district of the town, with villas along the sea. The monumental tomb on the Appia — a tower twenty-four metres high — is almost certainly his; and on the hill above, a hundred metres away as the crow flies, is the tomb of Tulliola, the daughter he had loved above everything. After Rome fell the people of Formia went up into the hills and split into two villages: Mola, from its mills, and Castellone, from the castle built there by Onorato Caetani, count of Fondi. In a villa at Formia, in 1861, the surrender of Gaeta was signed: the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies ended here. Beneath the centre lies the Roman cisternone, which can be visited; from the quay the ferries leave for Ponza and Ventotene.