What to see · Pomezia

More places of interest

• Castello Pratica di Mare File

  The castle of Pratica di Mare, also called the Borghese Castle, overlooks the tiny village of Pratica di Mare, a frazione of Pomezia. The settlement looks like a vicus beside a castle; according to the sources, the village stands on the site of the acropolis of the ancient Latin city of Lavinium.

  What to see

  The castle was built between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries all around an earlier tower, fortified and about forty metres high, which was destroyed during the Second World War. The plan is an irregular pentagon and the building looks more like a baronial palace than a castle; its exterior is medieval-Romanesque in style. The adjoining village is the work of Antonio da Sangallo the Younger and is very small: at the 2001 census it counted only 17 inhabitants.

  The locality, called Patras and included in the Civitas Laurentum, appears among the properties that Constantine is said to have donated to the basilica of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme in the time of Pope Sylvester I. Patricam is then recorded in the bull of Gregory VII of 1074, which confirmed its possession in full, with the church of San Lorenzo (today San Pietro Apostolo), to the abbey of San Paolo fuori le mura, to which it had been given by Pope Marinus I at the end of the ninth century: it was therefore the Benedictines who carried out the first fortification works. The abbey held the lordship at least until 1236, the year of the bull of Gregory IX, but from the twelfth century the castle was gradually usurped by Roman noble families, beginning with the Baroncini; in the fifteenth century it belonged to the De Judice and then to the Capranica, from whom it passed to the Massimo, who sold it in 1617 to the Borghese. The latter, over the years, restored it and helped keep the village going.

  Visiting

  The castle stands in a dominant position in the village of Pratica di Mare; according to the sources it is privately owned, like the church of San Pietro Apostolo, with the painting of the saint on the high altar, which is reported to be open on Sundays from 16:30. A hundred and fifty metres from the village, on via di Pratica, is the Pratica di Mare Museum. Hours and visiting arrangements should be checked.

  Our editors' tip

  Below the village of Pratica lies the so-called Lago delle Meraviglie, one of the three bodies of water in the territory of Pomezia.

• Museo Archeologico Lavinium

  The Lavinium Civic Archaeological Museum of Pomezia is at Pratica di Mare, near the medieval village of the same name. Created in 2005 as a permanent exhibition titled «Hic Domus Aeneae», it gathers part of the many finds from the excavations of the ancient city of Lavinium, which myth says was founded by Aeneas and which was the «mother of Rome» and the civitas religiosa of the Latin peoples.

  What to see

  The route, set up with multimedia equipment, comprises the rooms Tritonia Virgo, Mundus Muliebris, Hic Domus Aeneae, Civitas Religiosa and Aeneas Indiges. At the entrance the visitor is greeted by the statue of Minerva Tritonia, probably the cult statue of the sanctuary of Minerva, on a plateau at the eastern edge of the city: it is one of the few depictions of the goddess accompanied by the Triton. Nearby is one of the most interesting votive contexts of ancient Latium: statues mostly female, datable between the fifth and third centuries BC, in moulded terracotta, many life-size and originally polychrome. They belonged to a group of seventy or a hundred pieces, found in a votive deposit, and mostly show the worshipper in the act of bringing gifts (childhood toys, doves, pomegranates), a testimony to the importance of the cult of Minerva in rites of passage. From the same deposit come the heads and busts of the Mundus Muliebris room, with the hairstyles of the nubendae, girls about to marry, and with jewellery copied from real pieces; from the southern necropolis come female grave goods of the eighth and seventh centuries BC, with amber necklaces, amulets, fibulae and tools for spinning and weaving.

  The Hic Domus Aeneae room follows Virgil's poem: blue walls, the set of a ship's hull and a square sail on which films are projected wrap the visitor in the atmosphere of a sea voyage, while a video retraces the stages of the hero's journey from the coasts of Asia Minor to those of Latium; at the centre stands a wooden scale model of a ship of the late Bronze Age, reconstructed from ancient literary sources and from wrecks of the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BC. The Civitas Religiosa room is devoted to the southern sanctuary known as the «Thirteen Altars»: imported Greek pottery, votive bronzes, a bronze plate with a dedication to the Dioscuri in archaic Latin, statues and terracotta ex-votos, an optical theatre in which an ancient priest explains the cult, and the reconstruction of two protohistoric burials. In the Aeneas Indiges room is displayed the rich grave assemblage of the monument known as the «Heroon of Aeneas», a chest tomb of the seventh century BC with vases, metal objects and a chariot, covered by a mound ringed with trees; in the sixth century BC it was reopened and the assemblage was increased, as an expiation, with an Etruscan wine amphora and an oinochoe in heavy bucchero, and the tomb was reconsecrated to the mythical progenitor Indiges Numicus and then to Aeneas.

  Visiting

  The museum is at Pratica di Mare, near the village; its official website is museolavinium.it. The sources consulted give no opening hours or fees: check them.

  Our editors' tip

  The museum keeps the two tuff doors that closed the inaccessible cell built in the fourth century BC in front of the Heroon tomb.

• Sol Indiges

  The sanctuary of Sol Indiges, or locus Solis Indigetis, was a large coastal sanctuary devoted to a solar deity, at the mouth of the river Numicus, which was the harbour landing of ancient Lavinium. It lies in the area between the military airport of Pratica di Mare and the coast of Torvaianica, in the comune of Pomezia.

  What to see

  Archaeological investigations by the Sapienza University of Rome have brought to light the remains of a sanctuary set where the city's harbour landing stood and where ancient authors placed the legendary landing of Aeneas. The ancient coastal landscape was very different from today's: a wide system of lagoons open to the sea, fed by the streams of the Alban Hills, in which the Numicus, identified with the present Fosso di Pratica, left the coastal lagoon of the stagna Numici to reach the sea. Near that river the sources set the battle between Latins and Rutulians and the disappearance of Aeneas. Sol Indiges is the name of a solar deity of ancient Roman religion; the meaning of indiges is uncertain and is translated as «native» or «invoked».

  The fortified enclosure of the sanctuary was part of a system of garrisons at the river mouths of the Latium coast, which also included the castrum of Ostia: a programme to defend the Tyrrhenian coast that took shape between the conquest of Antium in 338 BC and the eve of the First Punic War. According to Karl Galinsky, in both the literary and the archaeological chronology the cult of Sol Indiges comes before that of Aeneas: the Aeneas Indiges of Lavinium stands beside the Latin ancestor and perhaps replaces him, in a development that cannot be dated before 338 BC. The attribution of the sanctuary is, however, debated: Mario Torelli recognises the landing place described by Dionysius of Halicarnassus in Castrum Inui, at the mouth of the Fosso dell'Incastro, in the territory of Ardea, and this calls into question the traditional attribution to Sol Indiges of the sanctuary at the mouth of the Numicus.

  Visiting

  The area extends between the military airport of Pratica di Mare and the coast of Torvaianica. The sources consulted give no opening hours or access arrangements: check them before setting out.

  Our editors' tip

  Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who saw the heroon of Aeneas in the Augustan age, reports the inscription «of the god Father Indiges who guides the current of the river Numicus». The monument now identified with that heroon, a mound of the seventh century BC restructured at the end of the fourth, was excavated less than a kilometre south of the village of Pratica di Mare.

• Tredici altari di Lavinio

  The sanctuary of the Thirteen Altars, or Tredici Are, is the southern sanctuary of ancient Lavinium, the city tradition says was founded by Aeneas, in the territory of today's Pratica di Mare, in Pomezia. It stands less than a kilometre south of the village, near the little church of Santa Maria delle Vigne, known as the Madonnella.

  What to see

  The sanctuary was discovered in 1959, after excavations begun by Ferdinando Castagnoli and Lucos Cozza. The altars, facing east, were built at different times: the oldest date from the end of the sixth century BC and the final layout was reached around the second half of the fourth century BC. In recent times a fourteenth altar has also been identified, not far from the first thirteen. Ferdinando Castagnoli identified the sanctuary with the common Latin sanctuary of Venus, the Aphrodision mentioned by Strabo; the number of altars has been linked to the federal character of the cult or, alternatively, to the need for simultaneous sacrifices on feast days.

  The area has yielded abundant votive material: imported Greek pottery, bronze statuettes, statues and terracotta ex-votos, and a bronze plate with a dedication to the Dioscuri in archaic Latin (Castorei Podlouqueique qurois), datable to around 500 BC and counted among the oldest documents of the Latin language; it attests the direct introduction of the cult of the Dioscuri from the Greek world, at a time close to its introduction at Rome. A bronze inscription with rules for sacrifices to Ceres also comes from here. An archaic building belongs to the same sacred complex, south of the settlement; a few tens of metres east of the altars the monument now known as the Heroon of Aeneas was excavated.

  Visiting

  The little church of Santa Maria delle Vigne stands on the Borghese estate, which is privately owned, next to the archaeological area of the sanctuary. The sources consulted give no opening hours or visiting arrangements: check them.

  Our editors' tip

  To understand how the sanctuary worked, the Lavinium Civic Archaeological Museum devotes a room, «Civitas Religiosa», to the Thirteen Altars: it has a graphic reconstruction of the architectural phases, a series of anatomical ex-votos and an optical theatre in which an ancient priest explains the cult and the rites practised.

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