Nemi Culture

Nemi's culture runs on two things that could hardly be less alike: a fruit and a catastrophe.

The fruit is the strawberry. Nemi is known for growing them and for the sagra held every year on the first Sunday of June, which is the town's own festival rather than an archaeological event.

The catastrophe is the loss of the ships. Two vessels that survived nineteen centuries underwater, were raised with enormous effort and then burned on 31 May 1944, define how this town is remembered — and the dispute over who burned them has never been settled.

Beneath both is a much older sacred identity. The place is named for a holy wood, and the Temple of Diana Nemorensis made it a famous place of pilgrimage in the Italian peninsula long before there was any town.

And the scale is part of the character: 1,829 people in 7.31 square kilometres, the second smallest comune in the Castelli Romani, whose boundaries wrap an entire volcanic crater.