San Felice Circeo is a town and comune in the province of Latina, in the Lazio region of central Italy. It was an ancient city called Circeii. It is one of I Borghi più belli d'Italia ("The most beautiful villages of Italy").
It is included in the Circeo National Park. Sites include the Grotta Guattari, one of the oldest Neanderthal sites in Italy, in which remains of nine Neanderthals were discovered.
Circeii was an ancient Roman city on the site of modern San Felice Circeo and near Mount Circeo, the mountain promontory on the southwest coast of Italy. The area around Circeii and Mount Circeo was thickly populated with Roman villas and other buildings, of which the remains of many can still be seen.
The origin of the name is uncertain: it has naturally been connected with Homer's legend of Circe. The difficulty has been raised that the promontory ceased to be an island well before Homer's time; but Procopius remarked that the promontory has all the appearance of an island until one is actually upon it.
Monte Circeo or Cape Circeo (Italian: Promontorio del Circeo [promonˈtɔːrjo del tʃirˈtʃɛːo], Latin: Mons Circeius) is a mountain promontory that marks the southwestern limit of the former Pontine Marshes, located on the southwest coast of Italy near San Felice Circeo. At the northern end of the Gulf of Gaeta, it is about 5 kilometres (3.1 mi) long by 1.5 kilometres (0.93 mi) wide at the base, running from east to west and surrounded by the sea on all sides except the north. The land to the northeast is the former ancient Pontine Marshes. Most of the ancient swamp has been reclaimed for agriculture and urban areas.
The mountain, the coastal zone as far north as Latina, including the only remaining remnant of the swamp, and two of the Pontine Islands offshore, Zannone and Ponza, have been included in the Circeo National Park.
The Paola Tower (Italian: Torre Paola) is a historic coastal tower in San Felice Circeo, Italy.
Circeo National Park (Italian: Parco Nazionale del Circeo) is an Italian national park founded in 1934. It occupies a strip of coastal land from Anzio to Terracina, including also a sector of forest in the mainland of San Felice Circeo, and the island of Zannone.
The park was established by order of Benito Mussolini, under advice from Senator Raffaele Bastianelli, to preserve the last remains of the Pontine Marshes which were being reclaimed in that period. It is the only national park in Italy to occupy only a plain and coastal area. It reaches from approximately Pontinia in the north to Sabaudia in the south.