Castel Gandolfo

Castel Gandolfo has 8,782 inhabitants in the Alban Hills, looking out over the volcanic Lake Albano, and is known worldwide for the Papal Palace, the historic summer residence of the popes: around it, from the seventeenth century on, the Roman aristocracy built villas and holiday houses. The collegiate church of San Tommaso da Villanova, on the square, is a design by Gian Lorenzo Bernini.

From the lake the Romans dug an artificial outlet through the rock: it starts just outside the town and runs for one thousand eight hundred metres to the place called Mole, where its waters turned the mills that ground the grain of Castel Gandolfo and Albano. Further down lies the little lake of Turno, an old crater reduced to an unhealthy marsh and reclaimed around 1611 by order of pope Paul V. On the shore of Lake Albano, instead, stands the Olympic rowing stadium, built for the Rome Games of 1960.