San Felice Circeo is a town and ''

comune A (; : , ) is an administrative division of Italy, roughly equivalent to a township or municipality. It is the third-level administrative division of Italy, after regions () and provinces (). The can also have the City status in Italy, titl ...

'' in the

province of Latina The province of Latina () is a province in the Lazio region of Italy. Its provincial capital is the city of Latina. It is bordered by the provinces of Frosinone to the northeast and by the Metropolitan City of Rome Capital to the northwest. ...

, in the

Lazio Lazio ( , ; ) or Latium ( , ; from Latium, the original Latin name, ) is one of the 20 Regions of Italy, administrative regions of Italy. Situated in the Central Italy, central peninsular section of the country, it has 5,714,882 inhabitants an ...

region of central

Italy Italy, officially the Italian Republic, is a country in Southern Europe, Southern and Western Europe, Western Europe. It consists of Italian Peninsula, a peninsula that extends into the Mediterranean Sea, with the Alps on its northern land b ...

. It was an ancient city called

Circeii Circeii was an ancient Roman city on the site of modern San Felice Circeo and near Mount Circeo, the mountain promontory on the southwest coast of Italy. The area around Circeii and Mount Circeo was thickly populated with Roman villas and other ...

. It is one of

I Borghi più belli d'Italia () is a non-profit private association of small Italian towns of strong historical and artistic interest, that was founded in March 2001 on the initiative of the Tourism Council of the National Association of Italian Municipalities, with the a ...

("The most beautiful villages of Italy"). It is included in the

Circeo National Park Circeo National Park (Italian language, Italian: ''Parco Nazionale del Circeo'') is an List of national parks of Italy, Italian national park founded in 1934. It occupies a strip of coastal land from Anzio to Terracina, including also a sector of ...

. Sites include the Grotta Guattari, one of the oldest

Neanderthal Neanderthals ( ; ''Homo neanderthalensis'' or sometimes ''H. sapiens neanderthalensis'') are an extinction, extinct group of archaic humans who inhabited Europe and Western and Central Asia during the Middle Pleistocene, Middle to Late Plei ...

sites in Italy, in which remains of nine Neanderthals were discovered. Capo Circeo Lighthouse is from the old town.

History

In the treaty signed between Carthage and Rome in 509 BC, the Carthaginians agreed not to harm Circeii. In 209 BC, during the

Second Punic War The Second Punic War (218 to 201 BC) was the second of Punic Wars, three wars fought between Ancient Carthage, Carthage and Roman Republic, Rome, the two main powers of the western Mediterranean Basin, Mediterranean in the 3rd century BC. For ...

, Circeii was one of twelve Latin colonies to refuse any more military contributions towards Rome and in 204 it was severely punished as a result, by furnishing double the greatest number of foot soldiers they had ever provided and 120 horsemen, all chosen from the wealthiest of the inhabitants, and to be sent out of Italy. Also an annual tax was imposed. The Roman

Triumvir In the Roman Republic, or were commissions of three men appointed for specific tasks. There were many tasks that commissions could be established to conduct, such as administer justice, mint coins, support religious tasks, or found colonies. M ...

Lepidus was exiled here after his fall in 36 BC by his former colleague, and future

Emperor The word ''emperor'' (from , via ) can mean the male ruler of an empire. ''Empress'', the female equivalent, may indicate an emperor's wife (empress consort), mother/grandmother (empress dowager/grand empress dowager), or a woman who rules ...

Octavian Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus (born Gaius Octavius; 23 September 63 BC – 19 August AD 14), also known as Octavian (), was the founder of the Roman Empire, who reigned as the first Roman emperor from 27 BC until his death in ...

.Jochen Bleicken, ''Augustus: The Biography'' Translated by Anthea Bell (London: Penguin Books, 2015), p. 198 In September 1975 the so called Circeo massacre took place in San Felice Circeo, the murder and rape of two young women which received significant media attention in Italy.

References

External links

SanFeliceCirceo.eu
Borghi più belli d'Italia {{Lazio-geo-stub