Civitavecchia, known by many essentially for its port, hides completely unexpected treasures.
Today it appears as the result of a millenary process of civilization and urbanization of the Latium territory, a territory of which, precisely in the area where this city now stands, significant elements are found superimposed and accumulated, through various epochs, confirming the presence and development of social organizations even from prehistoric times, and then Etruscan, Roman and medieval structures. Works that have made the city an urban center of such importance that it has assumed, since the days of ancient Urbe, the appellation of Port of Rome.
Civitavecchia is the heir to the Roman Centumcellae, built at the behest of Emperor Trajan in the years 107-108 AD. together with the harbor that represented, for many centuries, the fulcrum of exchanges and contacts among the peoples of the ancient Mare Nostrum.
The birth of Civitavecchia, between legend and reality, should be traced back to around the year 1000 when the old inhabitants of Centumcellae, who had fled because of Saracen raids, returned to repopulate Civitasvetula. At that time the erection of a fortress is recorded and from that time bitter struggles ensued for the possession and lordship of the fortress, with the supremacy of the De Vico family and, later, of Cardinal Giovanni Vitelleschi.
Subsequent events brought the city alternately under the rule of the French and the Popes.
Over the centuries the city saw periods of splendor with the construction and embellishment of numerous buildings, unfortunately destroyed or partly damaged by the last world war.
