Pontine Marshes

The former marsh is a low tract of mainly agricultural reclaimed land created by draining and filling, separated from the sea by sand dunes.

[5] The Via Appia, a Roman military road constructed in 312 BC, crosses the inland side of the former marsh in a long, straight stretch flanked by trees.

Further southward along the coast as far as Minturno is another stretch of former coastal marsh called the South Pontino, the largest section being between Terracina and Sperlonga, as far inland as Fondi.

Under Benito Mussolini's regime in the 1930s, the problem was nearly solved by placing dikes and pumping out that portion of the marsh below sea level.

The Agro Pontino geologically is one of four geomorphic divisions of a somewhat larger area, the Pontine Region, also comprising the Monti Albani, the Volscian Mountains and Monte Circeo; in short, all of Roman Latium.

The natural outcome of this graben topography was the creation of outer barrier islands and a lagoon that gradually filled with runoff sediment transported from the mountains.

The rift valley remained a depression in the Tyrrhenian Sea for about two million years and then in the Tuscolano-Artemisio phase, dated 600–360 thousand years BP, a series of volcanic changes began leading to the current landform: the first four eruptive cycles of a new volcano in the vicinity of the Monti Albani, which spread pyroclastic rock and formed a caldera.

Approximately contemporaneously, in the Middle Pleistocene, 781-126 thousand years BP, beds of sand and clay, termed the Latina Complex, appeared above sea level over the outer karst, enclosing a lagoon.

The Tyrrhenian II transgression of ocean water into the lagoon left the Minturno level and complex, a dune barrier of about 13 m (43 ft), dated 125–100 thousand years BP.

[6] These facts explain why the main fill of the lagoon is peat, silt, and clay, and not thicker-grained alluvial deposits, and why it took so long.

The increased rainfall required to move the sediment is attributed to the Atlantic Period, a time of warmer and moister climate dated around 5000-3000 BC.

The land (or the lake) was undoubtedly uninhabited except possibly for itinerant fowlers and fishers, but further, any evidence of human activity there would be deep in the underlying peat.

A skull of Neanderthal man was found in a grotto on Monte Circeo in Italy on February 25, 1939,[13] by a team of paleontologists headed by Alberto Carlo Blanc dating to about 65 thousand years BP.

Livy reported that after the Secessio plebis of 494 BC, a strike by the common people for political rights, a famine occurred at Rome due to decreased economic activity.

The Volsci attempted to exploit this momentary weakness by raising an army of invasion but were struck down by an epidemic, of what sort, or whether historians can conclude to be malaria, remains unsaid.

[17] Apparently, at least some of the marsh was under cultivation, which the high density of Roman settlements along the two northern roads might lead one to expect.

According to Plutarch, Julius Caesar had ambitious plans for the marsh, which if realized or realizable would have diverted the Tiber through it:[21]"During the expedition [a planned campaign around Europe] he intended ... to receive the Tiber immediately below the city in a deep cut, and giving it a bend toward Circaeum to make it enter the sea by Tarracina, ...besides this he designed to draw off the water from the marshes about Pomentium and Settia, and to make them solid ground, which would employ many thousands of men in the cultivation ..."In 1298, Pope Boniface VIII had a canal dug to connect the Ninfa River with the Cavata River, which drained much of the land in the Dukedom of Sermoneta, recently bought by his nephews.

In 1514, he decided to drain the region around Terracina instead, assigning the task to his brother Giuliano de Medici, commander of the papal army.

Giuliano died in 1516, and the city of Tarracina combined with Sermoneta and Sezze to halt work, over the issue of property rights.

In 1561, Pope Pius IV employed the services of the mathematician Rafael Bombelli, who had gained a reputation as a hydraulic engineer in reclaiming marshland in the Val di Chiana in the Tuscan Apennines, but the project also came to naught.

Near the end of the 19th century, a Prussian officer, Major Fedor Maria von Donat (1847–1919), had an idea; he would build a channel that followed the base of the mountains, cutting through a sand dune at Terracina.

By a law passed in 1899, the proprietors were bound to arrange for the safe outlet of the water from the mountains, keep the existing canals open, and reclaim the district exposed to inundation, for a period of 24 years.

[25] Starting in 1922, the Italian government's Department of Health, working with the Opera Nazionale Combattenti,[note 1] developed a new initiative to combat malaria called the bonifica integrale.

In 1926, the Department of Health undertook a pilot project of the new strategy in the delta of the Tiber River, reclaiming land and creating 45 new homesteads with great success, after which Mussolini climbed aboard.

The camps were overcrowded, wages were low, hours were long, food was bad, sanitation was poor, healthcare was missing, and medical attention was lacking.

[29] The government placed about 2,000 families (most from northern Italy) in standardised but carefully varied two-storey country houses of blue stucco with tiled roofs.

After the loss of Sicily, they successfully defended the Gustaf Line south of the marshes, necessitating an Allied landing at Anzio and Nettuno in an effort to outflank the Germans.

Ernie Pyle relates:[35]"On these little farms of the Pontine marshes Mussolini built hundreds of ... stone farmhouses ... Now and then I saw a farmer plowing while German shells landed right in his field.

The cities were in ruins, the houses blown up, the marshes full of brackish water, the channels filled in, the plain depopulated, the mosquitos flourishing, and malaria on the rise.

The specter of distant problems remains: the prospect of chemical pollution of the environment, DDT-resistant mosquitoes, and medicine-resistant strains of malaria.