The "Reclaiming" of the Pontine Marshes

By the 1920s 10–20,000 people lived in the Pontine Marshes, mainly shepherds and seasonal coal miners. The land was privately owned—partly by rich families, partly by the church—complicating the project of draining the marshes. The mosquitos spreading malaria did not make the area attractive. With the draining of the Pontine Marshes, a mythical, almost magical area that for centuries, if not millennia, had been of crucial importance to the European imagination, was forever lost. A few kilometers away from the center of Sabaudia, Ulysses of The Odyssey had his famous encounter with the witch Circe on what was then an island, today the Monte Circeo (or Circe’s Mountain). In the same area, a neanderthal skull was discovered in a cave in 1939. And the little church of the Sorresca (first mentioned in a bull by Saint Gregory the Great in 594), on the outskirts of Sabaudia, was long kept by the Templars (they sold it in 1202, but were back in the area in 1240, when pope Gregory IX needed their protection, and then built the tower raging over the town of San Felice Circeo, 14 km.s away from Sabaudia.) On the top of the Monte Circeo, there are reminiscents of an ancient acropolis. This was also an area where wealthy Romans in Ancient Rome built summer villas. The villa of the Emperor Domitian is twenty minutes by car from the center of Sabaudia. In the contemporary newspaper articles about the construction of Sabaudia, all this is often mentioned. In the beginning of the 1920s, the area is still connected with magic, witchery, and with the lethal malaria that infested the Pontine Marshes.

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