Ladispoli

The name is half Latin and half Greek: Ladislao-polis, the city of Ladislaus. Prince Ladislao Odescalchi founded it on 30 May 1888, but not to give the Romans a beach: a village had grown up around his castle of Palo, and he wanted to move its inhabitants and holidaymakers elsewhere. He had the new town laid out by an engineer, Vittorio Cantoni, on a strip of land between two streams. The day after its founding, however, Ladispoli became a hamlet of Civitavecchia, and in 1949 it passed to Cerveteri: born as a town, it took decades to become a comune.

Beneath it there is much more. Alsium stood here, one of the three ports of Etruscan Cerveteri, a Roman colony from 272 BC and then a luxury resort: Cicero recalls the villas of Pompey and of Caesar, and Pliny the Younger inherited one from senator Verginius Rufus — whose tomb, never finished, still stands at the end of the seafront of Marina di Palo. In the massacre at the tower of Palidoro, in September nineteen forty-three, three young men of Ladispoli were killed alongside Salvo D'Acquisto. Today the sand is dark and iron-rich, once sought for therapeutic sand baths; the marsh of Torre Flavia is a nature reserve with the ruined tower standing in the water, and offshore a small coral reef seems to be forming. In April the Roman artichoke festival fills the streets; Rome is half an hour by train.