The country you ride through
History on the road
0 to 20 km
Rome and the Appian Way
You leave St Peter's Square through Bernini's colonnade, cross the Tiber and roll past the Roman Forum and the Colosseum, which opened in AD 80. Then you join the Via Appia Antica. Work on it began in 312 BC under the censor Appius Claudius Caecus and it eventually ran all the way to Brindisi. The Romans called it the queen of roads. Look for the big grey basalt paving stones, the round tomb of Caecilia Metella and the entrances to the catacombs of San Callisto and San Sebastiano. In 71 BC, after the slave revolt led by Spartacus was crushed, Crassus had 6,000 captured rebels crucified along this road between Capua and Rome. You will meet Capua again tomorrow.
25 to 45 km
The Castelli Romani
The Alban Hills are an old volcano, and Lake Albano and Lake Nemi sit in its craters. Popes have spent their summers at Castel Gandolfo, just off the route, for centuries. Marino holds its Sagra dell'Uva on the first Sunday of October, when the fountains in the main square run with white wine. It started in 1925 and this year falls on Sunday 4 October, the day we reach Bari. Nemi is known for tiny wild strawberries and for Caligula's two giant pleasure ships, which were raised when the lake was drained between 1928 and 1932 and then lost to a fire in 1944.
55 to 90 km
The Lepini hills and Ninfa
Cori has a Temple of Hercules with Doric columns from the first century BC. Just before lunch the road passes the Garden of Ninfa, a medieval town abandoned to malaria and turned by the Caetani family from the 1920s into what many call the most romantic garden in the world. Lunch is up in Sermoneta, the Caetani family's walled town with its castle.
90 to 130 km
The Pontine plain
For 2,000 years the Pontine Marshes were a malarial swamp that emperors and popes tried and failed to drain. Mussolini's government finally did it in the 1930s and built new towns from scratch: Latina (founded as Littoria in 1932), Sabaudia and Pontinia. That is why the roads here are dead straight and lined with canals and eucalyptus windbreaks. On the horizon to the right is Monte Circeo, where Homer placed Circe, the enchantress who turned Odysseus's crew into pigs.
130 to 167 km
Terracina, Sperlonga and Gaeta
The Temple of Jupiter Anxur stands on the cliff above Terracina, and you can see it from the ice cream stop. The coast road to Sperlonga passes the Villa of Tiberius and its sea grotto. In AD 26 part of the grotto roof collapsed during a dinner and the emperor's prefect Sejanus shielded him with his own body. Huge sculptures of Odysseus blinding the Cyclops were found there in 1957. At Gaeta, the Montagna Spaccata is a headland split in three by a great crack that legend says opened when Christ died. Gaeta was also the last stronghold of the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, which surrendered here on 13 February 1861 after a three month siege, a month before the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed. Tonight try the tiella, a local pie, and the small dark Gaeta olives.
Look out for
- Original Roman paving on the Appia Antica
- The fountains of Marino
- Lake Nemi from the crater rim
- Ninfa's ruined towers
- Monte Circeo across the plain
- The Temple of Jupiter above Terracina
- Montagna Spaccata at Gaeta
Local heroes
Famous faces from along the route
Rome has produced more famous names than anywhere else on this leg. Julius Caesar was born in the city in 100 BC. So was Anna Magnani, the actress Tennessee Williams wrote parts for and the first Italian to win the Oscar for Best Actress, in 1956. Ennio Morricone, who wrote the music for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and more than 400 other films, was born in Trastevere and lived in Rome his whole life. Francesco Totti played 25 seasons for AS Roma and never left.
Down the coast the connections are older. The emperor Galba was born in a villa near Terracina in 3 BC and ruled for just seven months in AD 68 and 69. Tiberius spent long stretches at his villa in Sperlonga. Gaeta gave the Church a pope, Gelasius II, born here around 1060, and later sheltered another: Pius IX fled revolutionary Rome in 1848 and lived in Gaeta for most of the following year.