Albano is not Alba Longa, however hard tradition tried for centuries: the mother city of the Latins, if it stood anywhere, stood on the eastern shore of the lake, between Marino, Rocca di Papa and Ariccia. The name comes instead from the Albana, the estates of rich Romans on these hills, and further back from the Indo-European root *alb, «height» — the Mons Albanus, today Monte Cavo. The legend has stayed in the arms, though: a white sow with her piglets, the prodigy Virgil tells to Aeneas, and the motto Mater Urbis, mother of Rome. The «Laziale» is from 1872, to keep it apart from Italy's three other Albanos.
The real town begins in 202, when Septimius Severus quartered the Second Parthian Legion here, the only one permanently stationed near Rome, inside an estate that had been Domitian's. The Castra Albana are still everywhere: the Porta Pretoria — walled inside the houses until 1944, when an American bomb freed it — the amphitheatre cut into the peperino, the only one in the Castelli Romani, the baths Caracalla had built straight after killing his brother Geta, to calm the soldiers, and the Cisternone, the five-naved cistern that after eighteen centuries would still work. Santa Maria della Rotonda is a Pantheon in reduced scale. Below, Lake Albano is the Romans' summer beach.
