In Roman times this place was called Ad Statuas, for the number of statues that adorned the area, and it stood on the via Labicana some thirty kilometres from Rome. Here there was a villa which Suetonius attributes to Julius Caesar, and in which Caesar drew up his will, in September 45 BC; and here too, on 28 September 306, the praetorians and the people acclaimed Maxentius emperor while he was at the imperial villa. The excavations begun in 2010 have brought to light the villa, a large bath complex and a necropolis. In 1050, among those ruins, the Basilian monks of Grottaferrata built a church dedicated to Saint Caesarius of Terracina: a saint chosen to replace and christianise the cult of Caesar, and it is from him that the town takes its name.
The town you see today, however, was built in the twentieth century. The estate passed to the Ludovisi, who in 1622 began digging to bring the Roman statues back to light, and then to the Rospigliosi, who made it a farm worked by peasants who had come from Capranica Prenestina and settled on Colle Marcelli in a village of huts. In 1921 the Opera Nazionale Combattenti expropriated the estate, and in 1928 finished building a town for those same ex-servicemen. The first streets were named after heroes of the Great War, and one is called via dei Cedri, after the cedars of Lebanon that Caesar is said to have introduced: the cedar is on the coat of arms too. San Cesareo has been a municipality in its own right only since 11 April 1990.
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📅 Every year, on 27 August, with a procession of the relic of the deacon and martyr
San Cesareo celebrates Saint Caesarius of Terracina on 27 August, during which a relic of the saint, deacon and martyr, is carried in procession.
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The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside San Cesareo, but an easy day trip away.
