Lanuvio

The founder's name turned up on a wall in Sicily. Among the fragments of plaster found in 1969 at Taormina, in the gymnasium of ancient Tauromenion, there is mention of Fabius Pictor, to whom is attributed the account of the arrival in Italy, after the Trojan war, of a certain Lanoios, who is said to have founded in Latium a town that would take his name. Appian, on the other hand, credits the founding to Diomedes, lord of Argos. The ancient sources date it all to the years just after Troy; archaeology, on the hill of San Lorenzo, finds nothing older than the ninth century BC. Lanuvium was one of the thirty peoples of the Latin league and fought Rome repeatedly, almost always losing: after the final defeat of 338 BC it lost its independence, but by 332 it had won back privileged treatment and citizenship with the vote, in exchange for letting the Romans administer half the revenues of the sanctuary of Juno Sospita.

A document of 599 lists the estates of the district one by one, and the names still say whose they were: the fondo Solonio, where the Lanuvian actor Roscius Comoedus spent his childhood; the fondo Antonianus, from the villa of the emperors Antoninus Pius and Commodus, both born at Lanuvium; the fondo Cassianus, from a property of Cassius Longinus, one of Caesar's assassins; and the praedium Troianum, which points back to the town's Trojan origins. Another list, of 1244, does the same for the Middle Ages and lets us see that the whole area south of the town was then an immense marsh.