Learn about Lazio

Lazio is a region of west-central Italy stretching from the Tyrrhenian coast to the ridges of the central Apennines, organized into five provinces: Roma, Frosinone, Latina, Rieti, and Viterbo. Its capital, Rome, is also the capital of Italy, and the city's gravity shapes much of how the region is perceived from outside. Away from Rome, Lazio has its own layered identity, built from volcanic lake districts, Etruscan cities older than Rome itself, and a coastline and interior that developed largely independent of the capital's political history.

Before Rome existed as a city, this land belonged to the Latin peoples who gave the region its name, and to the Etruscans, whose civilization dominated much of central Italy in the first millennium BCE. The Etruscan necropolises at Cerveteri and Tarquinia, both inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2004, preserve a scale and detail of pre-Roman life -- painted tomb chambers, street-planned burial cities -- found nowhere else in the Mediterranean.

The region's geography is defined by a chain of volcanic craters: the Alban Hills south of Rome, now filled by Lake Albano and Lake Nemi, and the larger Lake Bolsena and Lake Bracciano further north and west. These lake districts, along with the Apennine interior and the long Tyrrhenian shoreline, give Lazio a physical variety that the popular image of Rome alone does not suggest.

Two UNESCO sites near Tivoli, Hadrian's Villa and the Renaissance gardens of Villa d'Este, and the excavated port city of Ostia Antica at the mouth of the Tiber, extend Lazio's historical record well past the reach of Rome's own city limits. Understanding the region means understanding how much of it exists on its own terms, only some of the time in relation to its capital.