At Peretto a Roman cistern survives, part of the water system designed to collect and store water for the villas and settlements of ancient Circeii.
Towards the end of the Republican period, and more clearly after the Social War that shook Rome in the 1st century BC, a period of relative calm returned to the territories under its control, which at the Circeo showed itself in a building boom.
In the period marking the transition from the Republic to the Empire, large residential complexes and sumptuous villas arose along the coast and on the slopes of the promontory, showing that the area was already devoted to tourism and chosen by wealthy Romans for their summer holidays.
As Horace, Juvenal and Pliny tell us, Circeii was famous for many foods: lactuca (lettuce), beta (chard), myrtle, laurel, many poisonous herbs used to treat viper bites, but above all the sweet oysters of the Circeo, which grew in abundance along the coast and in the brackish lakes.
There were many Roman villas dating from the late 2nd to the early 1st century BC: as late as 1928 Lugli identified 12 of them, besides Domitian’s villa on Lake Paola, both near the seafront (three) and on the mountain (two on the southern side and five on the northern side).
Of the three on the coast, one stood where Torre Vittoria is today, and in 1928 remains of a large platform, quay works and a probable villa could still be made out; another stood at Murone, of which the two arms of the portico remain; the third is the so-called Villa of the Four Winds.
Harder to reach are the villas on the slopes of the mountain, of which almost only the ancient water cisterns have survived. It is precisely the cisterns, used in various ways over the centuries, that have given different, sometimes legendary names to the places they occupy, according to their later uses. Their beauty and the close bond they have formed with the natural landscape, with which they have often merged, certainly deserve the interest of visitors looking for pleasant, charming places surrounded by nature.
So, hidden in the lush vegetation of the mountain, you can find the platforms of villas with cisterns known as the Grotta della Sibilla and the Grotta dei Banditi, once near the Mezzomonte fountain; the villa with cistern at Vasca Moresca, also used by the popes in the 17th-18th centuries to collect rainwater; the villa with cistern known as Grotta della Carella, in the old Aguet olive grove below the summit of the Picco; and finally the villa with the Peretto Cistern.
The Peretto Villa, on the hill of the same name about 1 km from the Historic Centre, was built on a series of artificial terraces forming a built area of about 120 x 170 m. Very little of the ancient structures remains: one of the rooms of a cistern and a stretch of rather roughly built opus incertum wall.
The cistern that supplied the site with water is the best-preserved structure. It originally had two parallel chambers, although only the southern one is in good condition. This rectangular, vaulted chamber is built in opus caementicium and, on the wall next to the collapsed chamber, has small reinforcing pillars. About halfway along the vault you can see the impluvium, the opening through which rainwater entered.
Continuing south, a few metres from the cistern, there is a short stretch of opus incertum wall, which must have been part of the terrace walls built against the mountainside to overcome its hilly nature and artificially create regular, buildable flat areas.
