Culture of Isole Pontine. Places to visit - old town, temples, theaters, museums and palaces

The Pontine Islands were inhabited far back in Antiquity. For a long time after this, pirates and time dominated here, and therefore a fairly large number of architectural monuments of the times of Ancient Rome remained almost intact. The local residents from ancient times lived on fishing, and the Romans, applying their knowledge in engineering, built here Grotto di Pilato, a system of artificial caves, grottos and pools, used, as scientists suppose, to grow eels. You can find them near Ponza Bay.

The Roman Gallery can be called another great heritage of ancient civilizations, which in fact is a tunnel, connecting the village called Ponza to the Chiaia di Luna beach. Throughout the island, you can find traces of the presence here of the Romans – the aqueducts, the bridges, the roads. In the center of Ponza, there are three necropolises, which, according to scientists, are the legacy of the Greeks, the Phoenicians, and the Egyptians. Fans of myths and legends should visit the Maga Circe grotto, where, according to Homer, during the winter lived Circe, a witch, who turned the whole team of the illustrious Odysseus into animals. Also on Ponza, there is a small ethnographic museum, which is worth visiting for those, who like ancient culture.

On the Belvedere hill you can find the ruins of an ancient villa and a medieval castle, which unfortunately suffered badly from time. Ponza is famous not only for the fact that it used to belong to the family of the Procurator Judea Pontius Pilate but also because later Ponza and the neighboring islands was the place, where the opponents of the regime of Benito Mussolini were exiled. The prisons, which were the place of imprisonment of the political prisoners, can be found all over the island. On the neighboring San Stefano, off the coast of Vertoten, the buildings that have survived since the Bourbon dynasty were used for these purposes. On Ponza there is also a place of suicide of Lucia Rosa, a girl, who refused to marry under compulsion. For many women around the world she is the symbol of the struggle for equality. A landmark of the island is also the statue of the Virgin Mary, which, according to the locals, fulfills the cherished wishes. Copyright www.orangesmile.com

Vertoten is the second of the two inhabited islands of the archipelago. Also populated in the Antiquity era, like Ponza, it was abandoned by its residents in the Middle Ages because of the incessant pirate raids. After that the inhabitants appeared here after the expulsion of the filibusters in the 18th century. Many scientists believe that in some impassable grottoes and at the bottom of the flooded caves the considerable treasures, looted by pirates, are still stored. If you want, you can try to find some historical rarity yourself. The remains of the old seaport can be considered the central monument of Roman domination on the island. Here, as well as in Ponza, several Roman aqueducts, and acropolises have been preserved. Almost all local monuments of antiquity have survived to this day in fairly good condition.

If you are interested in Mussolini’s regime, you can visit any of the prisons for "unreliable" citizens, which were used up until 1965. However, they started to excuse unwanted people here much earlier –the ruins of Villa Julia in Punta Eolo tell about this. The villa belonged to the daughter of Emperor Augustus. A walk around the city streets will tell you a lot about the life of the island, newly populated in the Renaissance. History fans should spend their time on a trip to Zannone, an island that is now a part of a national park. Earlier the existing Cistercian monastery was located here. Now only the ruins remained of this place,