Ardea

Ardea means heron: the town's name is the Latin word for the bird. Myth gives it two different foundations, each finer than the other: according to Dionysius of Halicarnassus it was founded by Ardeas, son of Odysseus and Circe; according to another version it was Danaë, the daughter of the king of Argos who had borne Perseus to Zeus, arriving on these shores and marrying the Rutulian Pilumnus — and they chose the place by rowing up the river Incastro until they saw the tufa crag. From that line, the legend says, came Turnus.

In the Aeneid Ardea is indeed the capital of Turnus, the Rutulian king who challenged Aeneas: it is among the oldest towns in Lazio, and its tufa acropolis keeps traces of that season. The twentieth century gave it a treasure of modern art: Giacomo Manzù chose to live here, and the collection dedicated to him — now a state museum — holds his doors, his cardinals and his drawings. The shore stretches the Roman beach southwards, but of the dunes that once marked it only some stretches remain: the rest was levelled to make room for building lots. The coast, for that matter, has already remade itself once, after the explosion of the Ischia volcano and the rise in sea level. Between Virgilian myth and contemporary sculpture, Ardea is a cultivated stop half an hour from the Colosseum.