Circeo

Circeo National Park was created in 1934 on the coast of Lazio, between Rome and Naples, and is one of Italy's four historic national parks. Its origin is bound up with an episode of destruction: it was declared to save a fragment of the great lowland forest and of the Pontine Marshes, which were being drained and ploughed up on a massive scale in those years, and it is therefore one of the first European parks created explicitly as a witness to a landscape that was disappearing.

The park brings together five very different environments in a small space. The Selva del Circeo is one of the last remnants of lowland plain forest in the Mediterranean, with oaks, ashes and hornbeams on ground that floods in winter. A coastal dune more than twenty kilometres long separates the sea from four brackish coastal lagoons — Fogliano, Monaci, Caprolace and Sabaudia — which are the ornithological heart of the area and hold important concentrations of wintering and migratory waterbirds. The Circeo promontory, an isolated limestone massif of more than 500 metres rising straight from the sea, contributes cliff vegetation and a series of caves with Palaeolithic deposits, among them the Grotta Guattari, where a Neanderthal skull was found. Completing the whole is the island of Zannone, in the Pontine archipelago.

In 1977 UNESCO brought Circeo into the world network of biosphere reserves, in the first batch of Italian designations alongside Collemeluccio-Montedimezzo. Because of its silhouette, recognisable from the sea, the promontory is also the place that tradition identifies with the island of the sorceress Circe in the Odyssey, from which it takes its name.