Lazio

View and book hotels in Lazio. Click here.

Everybody knows Rome, its capital, the great and irresistible capital of the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church.

The Catholic world centre is the Vatican, a favourite destination of tourism for the monuments of the Roman civilization.

Apart from the area of Rome, the rest of the territory is mostly plain and hills, with mountains in the area of Rieti such as Monte Terminillo (2213 metres), and on the north an area of lower mountains of volcanic origins, in whose craters many beautiful lakes took origin. More than half of the population of the whole region live in Rome.

Ancient Latium was inhabited by some native populations called Latini, Aernici, Aequi, Aurunci and Volsci. The legend of the origins of Rome, which cannot be established as founded or not, as told in many poems of ancient Rome and in Virgil's Aeneid, tells of a group of refugees from the city of Troy, destroyed by the Greeks around the 10th century BC, who led by Aeneas, reached the coast of Lazio, where their leader married the daughter of the local king.

During the 8th century BC with the foundation of the city of Rome, which was at first a monarchy until under the 7th king there was a war with the Etruscans and a republic ruled by two consuls and a senate was established.

In the centuries the Romans, gradually conquered the whole of Italy, then started their expansion in the Mediterranean and towards north in central Europe as far as the British Isles.

The republic gave way to an Empire in the first century BC and the first - and one of the greatest - Emperors, Augustus, reorganized the Empire in regions, so that Lazio and Campania were the Prima Regio.

In 1860 the Second War of Independence united many territories of the former State of the Church to the newborn Italian Kingdom, but Rome was taken only 1n 1870, after the Third War of Independence.