How San Felice Circeo was built and evolved over time

San Felice Circeo is built in the one sheltered position the promontory offers.

The historic centre sits on the eastern flank of the ridge, surrounded by a group of lesser hills that screen it: Peretto, Guardia Orlando and Monticchio to the north, Monte Morrone and San Rocco to the south. Above it the spine of the promontory rises through the Vetta di Paola to the Picco di Circe at 541 metres, with Punta di Torre Moresca, Punta di Vasca Moresca, Punta del Fortino di Cretarossa, Punta del Semaforo at 412 metres and Punta dell'Acropoli at 352.

The building material is underfoot. The promontory is composed mostly of limestones of several kinds — crystalline and white, compact, cherty with brachiopods, clayey — and it is limestone that gives the massif its caves.

The earliest dwellings here were not built at all. The Grotta Guattari, the Grotta del Fossellone and the Riparo Blanc are natural cavities occupied from the Neanderthal period to the Mesolithic, and they are the first architecture of the place.

The plain below is the newest ground in the comune: submerged sands, reclaimed during the fascist period, with the new town of Sabaudia founded on part of this landscape in 1934.

And the Capo Circeo Lighthouse stands three kilometres from the old town, at the seaward end of the headland.