San Felice Circeo

San Felice Circeo has 8,709 inhabitants on the promontory of the Circeo, which from Anzio looks like the profile of a lying woman — the Picco di Circe is her nose — and from Gaeta like an island. An island it really was, in the Quaternary, and the proof is in the rock: fossil sea grooves, marks of marine erosion, a sandstone that elsewhere is found only far below. In the Guattari cave, from 1937, the excavations of Alberto Carlo Blanc brought to light Neanderthal remains, among them a skull laid down according to a rite.

The Roman colony of Circeii was destroyed by the Saracen raids: in 829 the few survivors took refuge in Terracina, and the ancient name vanished. The new one came from the Templars, to whom pope Gregory IX entrusted the fortress in 1239: they called it Castrum Sancti Felicis, and San Felice has stayed. The boundary of the comune changed again in 1934, when the founding of Sabaudia took six hundred and ninety hectares of woodland from it, made good with as many taken from Terracina.