San Felice Circeo Culture

San Felice Circeo's culture rests on an identification between a landform and a myth, and the identification is not decorative.

The promontory is read as a person. From Anzio it shows the profile of a woman lying on her back, taken to be the sorceress Circe, with the summit named Picco di Circe as her nose. From Gaeta the same mass reads as an island — the ancient Isola Eea, Aeaea, the island Homer gave to Circe. The nearby island of Ponza makes the counter-claim: the grotto on its western shore is called the Grotta della Maga Circe, and the tradition there holds that she wintered in the cave and spent her summers on Mount Circe, on the mainland. The two places share one legend between them.

Beneath the myth is a far older presence. This is one of the oldest Neanderthal sites in Italy, and the ritually arranged skull from the Grotta Guattari means the promontory has carried meaning for its inhabitants for fifty millennia.

The modern town is officially recognised as one of I Borghi più belli d'Italia, and lives inside Circeo National Park.

And the comune is split between two very different landscapes: a limestone headland six kilometres long, and a plain of reclaimed sand created within living memory.