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The old town
View of Terracina
Terracina Bus Terminal.
Terracina signpostTerracina
Terracina is a comune and episcopal see of the province of Latina - (until 1934 of the province of Rome), Italy, 76 km SE of Rome by rail (56 km by the Via Appia).
Terracina occupied a position of notable strategic importance: it is located in fact at the point where the Volscian Hills (an extension of the Lepini Mountains) reach the coast, leaving no space for passage between them and the sea, commanding the Pontine Marshes (urbs prona in paludes, "a city flat in the marshes", as Livy called it) and possessing a small harbour. In 509 BC Tarracina was already under Roman supremacy, but was not included in the list of the Latin league of 499 BC. In 406 it was stormed by the Romans, then lost in 402, recovered in 400, unsuccessfully attacked by the Volsci in 397, and finally secured by the establishment of a colony of Roman citizens in 329 BC.
Medieval buildings
The Cathedral of SS. Pietro e Cesareo (Duomo) is ensconced within a temple of Rome and Augustus, part of the side wall of which, with engaged columns, is still visible. The holy edifice was consecrated in 1074, and renovated in the 12th and 18th centuries. The Cosmatesque style vestibule is preceded by a 18-steps staircase, and supported by ten ancient columns resting upon recumbent lions, with a mosaic frieze upon them, made by 12th century Sicilian-Norman artists. The brick campanile, in Gothic-Romanesque-style, has small columns with little pointed arches. The interior has a fine Cosmatesque pulpit supported by ancient columns resting on lions, a Paschal candlestick of 1245, and a good pavement of the same period with beasts and dragons.
To the right of the Duomo is the noteworthy Gothic Palazzo Venditti, from the first half of the 14th century.
The town walls consist of Byzantine and Middle Ages towers erected along the Volscan and Roman curtain, in "polygonal" style similar to those of Constantinople. After a three-ways crossing, next to Porta Nuova, is the Frangipane Castle or Rocca Traversa, which in 1202 became the symbol of the communal freedom of Terracina. It was however damage by Allied bombs on September 4, 1943.
Other interesting churches are those of San Domenico (erected in the first decades of the 13th century, and enlarged in 1298) and San Francesco (1222), which follows the Gothic-Cistercian style of the Abbey of Fossanova
