Lazio

The region changes with every road. Rome is the dense core, a city of stone and traffic where the Forum and the trams share a single afternoon. Head south-east and the land climbs into the Castelli Romani, a ring of hill towns built around old volcanic lakes, where the air is cooler and the wine tastes of the ash the vines grow in. To the north the Sabina hills turn silver with olive groves, and the mountains of the Simbruini and Lepini rise above them, quiet and sparsely settled, with abbeys tucked into the folds. Further north-west, the Tuscia belt is Etruscan country: tufa cliffs, sunken lanes cut between gorges, and the medieval quarter of Viterbo, where the streets still follow their old plan. The south is different again. The Pontine plain was marsh until the twentieth century, and its straight canals and low, orderly towns carry the flat, deliberate geometry of land that was drained by decree.

A good day here can start in the necropolis at Tarquinia, where painted tombs show dancers and banqueters in colours that have outlasted the people who ordered them. By midday you might be in Tivoli, walking the terraces of the Villa d'Este, where water runs down stone channels past cypresses and moss-green basins. The afternoon belongs to the coast. The sand at Sabaudia runs for miles between dunes and a lagoon, and the wind smells of pine. Around the Circeo promontory the woods come down almost to the water, and the old headland still looks like the island Homer imagined. Further along, Sperlonga's whitewashed lanes drop steeply toward the sea, and Terracina stands on its hill above a shoreline where Roman stone meets fishing boats hauled up on the beach. Nothing is staged. The sea is simply there, and so is the bread from the bakery, and the shade of an umbrella pine.

Most people leave Lazio with the capital in their minds, but the region keeps giving reasons to return. The lakes, the Etruscan roads, the pine-scented dunes and the quiet mountain villages each hold a different version of the same long history. Staying longer means discovering that the coast is not a separate place from the hill towns or the ruins, but the final stretch of one continuous land, where ancient, medieval and modern Italy meet at the edge of the water.