How Ponza was built and evolved over time

Ponza as it looks today is largely an eighteenth-century design project, laid over two older layers.

The Roman layer is infrastructure. Several aqueducts — the largest running from Le Forna down to Santa Maria — along with dams and the great reservoirs called Piscinae Limariae, some of them very large, supplied the islanders, provisioned merchant shipping and watered the entire Roman fleet. There was a major port work at Santa Maria, whose mouth was where the beach is now. Two long tunnels, still used by cars, joined that port to the villas. Almost all those villas have been destroyed or quarried as building material for what stands above them, and no protection of the Roman ruins has ever been put in place on the island, even in recent times.

The Bourbon layer is the town. Under Antonio Winspeare, an officer of the Engineers, and the engineer Francesco Carpi, the works carried out between 1768 and 1793 produced the Port of Ponza with its characteristic curved backdrop of houses on two street levels, the cemetery, the fortress, the Palazzo degli Uffici — today the seat of the comune — the church, Forte Papa at Le Forna, and the settlement of Ventotene with its small port, called Pozzillo. The labour was several hundred convicts serving life sentences, who were shut into the island's new prison in 1795.

The same two men built the Ergastolo di Santo Stefano, a work of real architectural significance whatever one feels about its use: a horseshoe plan with a central chapel doubling as an observation point, drawn from the Panopticon principles of the Briton Jeremy Bentham.

The agricultural layer is the hills themselves. The island was heavily forested with giant trees in antiquity; the forest is gone and the slopes are covered with man-made terraces. Most are no longer worked and are falling apart for want of maintenance, though grapes, cactus pears and figs are still grown on some. Monte Guardia still carries the rotting stumps of those extinct giant trees, over eight feet across.