Sperlonga attractions
Type
Access: Open to visitors
Price
Sperlonga's sights are a Roman villa below and a defensive town above.
The villa of Tiberius lies on the shore south of the centre, an enlargement of an earlier late-Republican villa whose rooms were arranged around a portico. Its natural grotto — known to archaeologists since 1908 — was fitted out as a summer dining room with water features and the sculpture groups of the Odyssey cycle, including the colossal Polyphemus group, found in fragments in 1957 and now shown in the museum on the site.
In the town, the eleventh-century walls leave two gates, the Portella (or Porta Carrese) and the Porta Marina, both carrying the arms of the Caetani family. The church of Santa Maria is first mentioned in 1135.
On the point stands Torre Truglia, built in 1532, destroyed in a raid by Barbarossa, rebuilt in 1611 and destroyed again in 1623 — the single clearest object in town for understanding what this coast used to be.
