The medieval borgo is the oldest part of Nettuno and looks out onto the lungomare Matteotti, right by the sea. It looks medieval, but its origins may be older: according to some reconstructions this was the site of Cenone, the fortified port of Antium, and perhaps of the temple of the god Neptune that gave the town its name. Between the ninth and tenth centuries a colony from the Neapolitan islands built a castle here; the fief then passed to the monks of Grottaferrata, to the Frangipane and in 1427 to the Orsini, who raised a circuit of walls with eight towers on the existing fortifications.
What to see
The streets are narrow, typical of a medieval layout, and therefore pedestrian: via del Baluardo, via del Quartiere, via dello Steccato, via Marcantonio Colonna, via del Cavone, with alleys named after the nearby streets. The main squares are piazza Guglielmo Marconi, piazza San Giovanni and piazza Segneri-Soffredini. At the centre is the collegiate church of San Giovanni, dedicated to Saints John the Baptist and John the Evangelist; around it stood the oratory of the Carmine, the church of the Santissimo Sacramento and the baronial palace of the Colonna, which passed to the Borghese in 1831.
The borgo also has Palazzo Doria Pamphilj, with frescoes by Pier Francesco Mola visible in the rooms of the school next door. In 1594 the Papal State bought Nettuno from Marcantonio Colonna for four hundred thousand scudi, and between 1625 and 1626 it restored the borgo and rebuilt the San Rocco bastion.
Visiting
You enter from the lungomare Matteotti through two arched gates, from piazza Mazzini into via Marcantonio Colonna, by a stairway from via della Resistenza Nettunese and by two stairways from the marina. The borgo is lived in, even along the walls and in the towers, and on summer evenings it fills with people drawn by its many bars, ice-cream shops and restaurants.
Our editors' tip
Just outside the borgo, to the west, stands Forte Sangallo, built at the start of the sixteenth century by Pope Alexander VI to defend the coast from Barbary corsairs.
