About three kilometres from the town of San Felice Circeo stands the Capo Circeo Lighthouse, built in 1866 under the pontificate of Pius IX, as part of a programme to develop maritime signals along the stretch of Lazio coast under the jurisdiction of the Papal States.
In the list of “Lighthouses and fog signals” it has the national number E.F.2258 and the international number E1542. The Lighthouse, which belongs to the Italian Navy, rises on the side of the promontory called Quarto Caldo and consists of a building, used as housing for the civilian staff who look after it, and a lighthouse tower about 18 metres high, entirely covered in tiny majolica tiles.
Its lens apparatus consists of three panels set on a rotating structure and housed in a cylindrical lantern with helical sectors, about two metres in diameter, whose white flashing light has a geographical range of 17 miles. The system, now fully automated, has a small back-up light that switches on by itself in case of failure.
Although the Lighthouse is modern, it was built in an area, Quarto Caldo, permanently occupied since the end of the 2nd century BC, as shown by the many remains of walls and cisterns that certainly belonged to Roman villas at different heights along the slopes of the mildest part of the mountain.
In particular, at the beginning of the 20th century remains of an opus reticulatum wall, tiles and potsherds that must have belonged to an ancient structure could still be seen near the Lighthouse. Given the nature of the rocky coast, which forms a sheltered inlet here, it is likely that already in ancient times there was a landing place for boats arriving at the Circeo.
The road from Piazzale San Francesco to the Lighthouse is in fact very old: until almost the beginning of the Great War it was still the one the Romans cut along the edge of the mountain, with a series of steps following the changes in level. Unfortunately, building the modern road destroyed the ancient route, of which only the stretch with the ancient inscription “Ad Promontorium Veneris” has been spared.
The inscription is framed by a pediment, and the text, very worn especially in the last line, reads:
+PROMONTUR(IUM) VENERIS PUBLIC(UM) CIRCEIENS(IUM) USQ(UE) AD MAREM A TERMINO… LXXX LONG(ITUDO) PED(UM) P(LUS) M(INUS) DCCXXV+.
The inscription, dated to the second half of the 1st century BC, was a boundary stone on the road that skirted a public area reaching down to the sea and led towards the Promontory of Venus. It is interesting that this part of the mountain was dedicated to Venus, whose cult perhaps merged with the older, typically local cult of the sorceress Circe, to whose mythical figure the whole promontory is dedicated.
