Ciampino

Ciampino was born with flight and left home late. The airport opened in 1916 for airships and is among the oldest in the world still working: from here, on 10 April 1926, took off the Norge of Umberto Nobile, the airship that carried men over the North Pole for the first time; two years later the Italia left from here too, the one that did not come back. In the town's arms there are six silver arrows for flight and bunches of grapes for wine: half airport, half vineyard.

For the whole twentieth century, though, Ciampino was not a comune: it was a hamlet of Marino. Grown around the tracks and the runways — two and a half thousand inhabitants in the thirties, twelve thousand in the sixties — it tripled its population between the sixties and the seventies, and a committee for autonomy was formed. It succeeded: a regional law of 1974 made it the eight thousand and sixty-fourth comune in Italy, and the title of city came in 2004. Today it is one of the most densely populated towns in Italy, a crossing of four railway lines and Rome's low-cost gateway. Whoever lands here has the Appia Antica ten minutes away and the Castelli on the other side: few notice, and it is a pity.