Mussolini did many worthwhile things, other than make Italian trains run on time. For one, he finished what others before him—back to 162 B.C.—had tried to do. He drained the vast Pontine Marshes, ridding the area of malaria and creating vast agricultural lands that pulled the economy out of a quagmire. And he built Sabaudia. Of all the charms we expect of Italian towns—ancient piazzas, flowering balconies, villas of ocher, saffron, and rose, cart-narrow streets, Romanesque churches—Sabaudia has none. The architecture is post–World War One razionalismo, rationalist, the Italian offshoot of the modernist international style: functional, unornamented, pared-down materials, and composed mostly of squared-off volumes. Razionalismo was the preferred style of the fascist government.
We are visiting Sabaudia, just a two-hour drive south from Rome, for its twenty-three kilometers of beach and the four beguiling lakes just behind the strand. May has arrived, balmy and soft. We check into Hotel Il San Francesco, built of white cubes with curvy details. Our all-white room looks out at lawns sloping to a lake. Early check-ins are a bonus to off-season travel. Ed has time for his walk and I have time to sit near the lake and read before lunch.
The dining room personifies the word airy. Doors are open in the glass-walled room where breezes send all the sheer curtains drifting. We share a large fennel, orange, black olive salad, then grilled octopus on a bed of chicory and fried shrimp. “Push through,” Ed says over coffee, when I am leaning toward a long siesta with the doors to our balcony open.
We do. We drive the five minutes to the beach, which is blessedly undeveloped, with wooden access paths every few kilometers. No one! Not a soul. How rare. No concessions and umbrellas and beach lounges. A few houses at the far end toward a picturesque watchtower, a couple of hotels, a few bars and fish shacks. Waves, gentle, clouds, busy, sand, soft and gold, air salt-tanged, sweet.
I DO GET my short rest. I tuck my watch with its news alerts and dings reminding me to stand up into a pocket of my suitcase. I’m switching to beach time.
Late in the afternoon, we walk around Sabaudia. I expect to be disinterested in the town, but we find a lively place with palms, plumbago, and oleander in bloom. Almost a hundred years on, rationalist architecture has acquired its own historicity. What was never lost in the Italian version of modernism is the human scale of the buildings. With such a long distance from the fascist era, the eye begins to see less demagogic purpose and more of the adherence these severe buildings have to classical architecture. The Italians never let go of their love for the Romans and Greeks. Or of travertine and marble over concrete. The Piazza del Comune must have double-functioned as an outsize military parade ground. A small market of local honey and organic products stands where the Blackshirts held forth, and farther out tiny boys are playing soccer. Electronic music blares from one of the cafés lining the perimeter. Stores sell beach toys and flip-flops along the sidewalks, and gelato shops send genial troops of teenagers out with towering cones of melon and coffee and hazelnut gelato. Well-dressed, prosperous, the sabaudiesi are all out for a stroll. Wouldn’t the five architects who won the design competition for planning this place be shocked? Their rigorous, utopian town, designed for workers and transplants from poor sections of the north, now thrums with a relaxed seaside vibe. Flip-flops and beach hats replacing military boots and helmets.
Over Campari sodas, with a view of the official buildings and a clock tower, we check our books. Started in 1933, Sabaudia was built in a miraculous 253 days! Six thousand workers labored, accomplishing a Roman grid design down to a decumanus cutting through the center. The old post office stands out. The oval form and bold staircase are not at all like the severe volumes of the vertical clock tower, the horizontal town hall. Now a library and documents center, it’s the only major structure not designed by the selected team of five but was conceived instead by a man named Angiolo Mazzoni. Maverick lurking in the wings: shiny blue tile, red marble, and primary yellow trim instead of the somber grays of the overall plan. “I bet Mazzoni wasn’t a real die-hard fascist,” Ed says. But I look him up and he was. He designed many, many post offices, train stations, and other public buildings across the realm for Mussolini. Yet something says liberty in his designs; he must have been torn. He fled to South America after the war.
We walk over to the municipal buildings. I always feel a creepy shiver when I see the fascist symbol, the ax and bundled rods, carved into a building. But inside the regime’s tower, now the Museo della Torre Civica, we find a surprise: two hundred artworks inspired by Dante.
WE DRIVE THE tree-lined Appian Way over to Pontinia for dinner at Ristorante Essenza. Finding it isn’t easy but we have a little tour of the town, which was also a fascist endeavor. Teatro Fellini. A blur of other rationalist buildings. Stuck out in a nondescript residential neighborhood, the restaurant’s premises look a bit shaky. We’re drawn inside by its Michelin star. Very chic and inviting and the staff super friendly. What a treat. Everything outstanding: a soup of Parmigiano, hazelnut, saffron, and potatoes with a Parmigiano foam. The mellow background music just serves to relax us for the next course. Which is, for me, shrimp on a red pepper sformato (a puffy quiche-like tart), and for Ed the catch of the day—didn’t catch the name of the fish—with panzanella and smoked burrata. Just for taste, we shared the baby pig with peanuts, chard, and mustard.
Throughout this feast, we’re impressed with splendid, surprising wine parings from very particular sources: Terra delle Ginestre Lentisco, 2014, a local bianco made from the scarce bellone grape and fermented in chestnut casks, which gives a hint of smokiness to the airy wine; Stefano Antonucci, 2011 Tardivo Ma Non Tardo (late, not too late), a spun-gold verdicchio from Jesi in Le Marche; Alma Mater Consoli from Damiano Ciolli in Lazio, dark and fruity, made from indigenous cesanese grapes; and Noelia Ricci, La Vespa 2015, a sangiovese from Emilia-Romagna. Their labels show drawings of vineyard animals and insects. The sangiovese label design is a vespa, wasp. And this wine, full-bodied, with enough tannins to deliver a little sting.
Generous pours, a dessert of white chocolate meringue with raspberries; espresso, we’re off. Down the arrow-straight Appian Way, this ancient road from 312 B.C. Maybe it’s the wine: I start singing “Do You Know the Way to San Jose,” until Ed says, “Mio dio, Frances.”
Back to Hotel Il San Francesco, where a boozy wedding dinner is wrapping up in the garden. The last music floats up to our room, over the lake, over the dunes, out to sea.
ED IS OUT early. When we meet at breakfast, he shows me photographs he took of jasmine. Hedges, tall, trained up over trellis gates, jasmine tumbling from balconies and climbing onto roofs. Our jasmine arbor at Bramasole blew down in a storm. We’re inspired to replant.
What else to see? The fabulous Garden of Ninfa. But we cannot get a reservation. Another time. Instead, we set off for Sermoneta.
ON BACK ROADS, we pass through sweet countryside of olive groves and yellow wildflowers, then a castle on a tall mound with chopped-off edges, leaving the castle perched precariously. How does anyone enter? The walled town of Sermoneta spreads across a spur of a green mountain, situated much like Cortona, our adopted Tuscan hill town.
High above any marsh problem, the medieval town, also topped by a castle, takes us back into the Italy we know. Twisty up-and-down cobble streets, some scarcely wider than a person; sudden long views between stone houses; pastry, cheese, and wine shops. There are tourists, mostly Italians out for a Sunday gita. Not thronged but enough to fill the few restaurants. We end up at a tiny place named Street Food. The owner squeezes us into a nook adjacent to his friends who are playing cards. Street food it’s not; we love the huge and hearty roasted vegetable sandwiches on crunchy bread. And love joining for a little while the boisterous group next to us. I’m always heartened by the genuine friendliness of Italians. Boundless! “Americans? I have a brother in Pittsburgh!”
“How did he happen to go there?” A story ensues. We’re bonded. He offers the coffee, now that we’re friends.
What a romantic town: branching and twining streets full of mystery and surprise. A friend used to have a house here. When I mention her name to the owner of the ceramics shop, she remembers her well. “Ah, la Susanna!” We take a photo together to send to her. When I buy a platter, she gives me a big discount. Everywhere, the human touch. The natural intimacy that sets apart life in Italy from life anywhere else.
I photograph the lavatoio comunale, the three-part stone basins with circulating water for washing your clothes. I think I would like to rinse out my blouses here. Sheets, probably not. We wander up to Santa Maria Assunta, the thirteenth-century church built on top of a Roman temple. The façade is somber but graced by a lovely rose window carved from stone. Outside are posted the rules for entering: silence, turn off cell phone, no smoking, dress decorously, no American chewing gum.
TONIGHT, BACK IN Sabaudia, we’re at a simple trattoria near the hotel. A platter of grilled razor clams with crispy French fries, half a carafe of local red. We are the only customers so the waitress lingers, telling us about her cousin’s fishing boats and her son who wants to be a deejay.
WHEN I WAS growing up in Georgia, my family went at least once a month to Fernandina, just barely into Florida. We all loved the beach. There, most of the time, we resembled a normal family. My daddy and I got up to see the sunrise over the ocean. I rode, arms out for balance, on the backs of turtles as they made their way back to the water after laying eggs in the warm sand. Daddy would, or so he told me, give the bottles I stuffed with notes to the shrimp boat fisherman to throw in the water far at sea. Write to me. I am from Fitzgerald, Georgia.
Therefore and forever after, I’m seeking the right place where water meets sand. So many Italian beaches are narrow or rocky or full of people. Sabaudia is unique. The long beach is separated only by a narrow road and then dunes from a series of lakes. The largest, Lago di Sabaudia, reaches fingers farther into the interior, creating vast amounts of lake frontage.
I can’t get enough of the beach. Are any of the well-hidden houses for rent? I’d like to come back for a week. Meanwhile, early and late, I walk.
A WATCHTOWER, TORRE di Paola, anchors the Monte Circeo promontory jutting into the sea. Driving south from the beach road, we turn uphill near the tower; we’re en route to the small town of San Felice Circeo; Circeo, yes, that’s Circe, who zapped Ulysses’s crew, turning them into pigs.
Both Sabaudia and San Felice Circeo are located within the 21,004-acre Parco Nazionale del Circeo, established in 1934, when the marsh was drained. The park has recently been expanded. Trekking trails, twenty kilometers of dunes, ruins of cyclopean walls and an acropolis, extensive forests, Mediterranean maquis and holm oaks, lakes, and coast—a rich ecosystem and resource. Amazing that long ago the fascists saved this bountiful resource. From the other side of the tower, you can go by boat to explore forty-odd caves where Neanderthal remains have been found; people have appreciated the beauty of this area for eons.
San Felice Circeo, starting point for many leisurely-to-strenuous walks. And what a delectable village: a main street lined with butter-yellow-to-golden buildings, a fountain, casual clothing shops, gelato, gelato, gelato, and cafés where pensioned men sit talking under umbrellas. The town hall was originally the house of the Knights Templar. At the entrance gate, the inviting cinema is dedicated to Anna Magnani. On display in the tourist office—we always stop at the tourist office—there’s a head of Circe, found by a shepherd, quite stunning and more so for being exhibited alone. From the port, you’re close to the island of Ponza and can jump on a boat and be there in an hour. The activities seem endless, but we are on the road again tomorrow.
AFTER A LONG fish, fish, fish lunch, we repair to the hotel to replenish. I have research to do on my laptop. (Exactly how many lakes are there?) Ed is on the balcony with his notebook. On the lawn below, a first communion party moves into its fourth hour. A long lunch under umbrellas, table laid for maybe sixty, is over. Half have gone but the rest linger in the mellow afternoon. A few men still sit at the table, smoking and talking. Cards come out for a game of scopa. Women lounge in the lawn chairs with children playing games all around them. Two fairy princesses, the honored ones, in their white dresses spin and cartwheel. Another child is on crutches. Badly dressed among the swans. The one who hurts. The others cavort in their lacy dresses. Someone plays a sweet guitar. How many such celebrations I have attended—sometimes bored with the endlessness of it but usually lulled and carried by the timelessness of what Italians do best, celebrating life.
I’m sinking into the pillows, dreamy, thinking strangely that if I were to die now, this would not be a bad ending, listening to an Italian party on a spring afternoon.
NOTES:
The architects of Sabaudia: Gino Cancellotti, Eugenio Montuori, Luigi Piccinato, Alfredo Scalpelli. The post office architect: Angiolo Mazzoni.
The lakes behind the beach are Lago di Sabaudia, Lago dei Monaci, Lago di Fogliano, and Lago di Caprolace.
Article of interest on Sabaudia by Michael Z. Wise: https://www.guernicamag.com/michael-z-wise-mussolinis-new-town/