Sperlonga historical timeline

There are traces of human activity in the territory from the Middle Palaeolithic onwards. A mythic tradition places the city of Amyclae, founded by Spartans, near Sperlonga — a tradition rather than a documented history, and worth keeping in that category.

In Roman times numerous villas were built here. The most famous is the one attributed to the emperor Tiberius, which included a natural cave modified and decorated with sculptures of the Odyssey cycle. The villas doubled as production centres for the fishing industry, with tanks for farming fish. The town's name probably derives from that great grotto — spelunca — absorbed into Tiberius's villa.

In the sixth century the ruins of the imperial villa were used as a refuge, but the settlement proper grew up on the nearby promontory of San Magno, 65 metres above the sea, as a defence against Saracen raiding from the water. The population moved up to escape both the unhealthy marshes and the attacks; the many watchtowers along the coast to Gaeta are the physical record of that threat.

A castrum Speloncae appears in a document of the tenth century, including a small church dedicated to St Peter, patron of fishermen. The town then grew around the castle in concentric rings. In the eleventh century it was walled, and two gates survive — the Portella, or Porta Carrese, and the Porta Marina — both bearing the arms of the Caetani.

Sperlonga stayed a small fishing village under constant threat from pirates. In the summer of 1534 the small centre was destroyed by the Ottoman fleet under Barbarossa, and many inhabitants, especially women, were enslaved in the Barbary slave trade. In 1623 a fleet of Barbary corsairs raided it again, an event remembered in a poem, Il sacco e rovina di Sperlonga nel 1623, by the surgeon and poet Curzio Mattei of Lenola.

Rebuilt between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, it took its present form — called a testuggine, tortoise-shell — and acquired churches and noble houses; in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it recovered further and agriculture flourished.

The modern town begins with a road. Development based on tourism started only after the opening of the Via Flacca, the coastal road linking Terracina to Gaeta, inaugurated on 9 February 1958; its construction is also what turned up the sculptures of Tiberius's grotto, found in fragments in 1957. Between them, the road and the discovery ended centuries of isolation and extreme poverty.