I'd originally been meaning to post that sequence of pics with a different title ("how to find an unspoilt beach"??? ).. with emphasis mostly on creeping militarisation of land and coasts, but with the US election results so much in my mind the photo-sequence kind of "fell into place" as a metaphor for it- glad you liked it!
The girl in the photo isn't me but ...I could say she looks very like me?? - that is, "me" 20 years ago, as she's my daughter. A very NICE daughter, as you can see! (P.S. for the formality-minded: before posting I duly asked for and obtained her permission to use her image on the internet for Eurotrib agit-prop purposes).
The place shown is called Torre Astura, it takes its name from the squat little fortress-thingy you can see in the distance just above my daughter's head, it's a coastal defence watchtower+castle dating back to the 13th century...
...and it's just a few miles down the coast heading south from Anzio. So in relation to where I live (Albano in the "Castelli Romani" district) it's about 40 minutes drive from home - and "thanks" to being fenced off because of its military-domaine status (seems the pinewoods are occasionally used for some kind of artillery training by the Italian army..) it is that very rare thing around here - a genuinely unspoilt, wild and lonely beach.
That hole in the fence is in fact a "semi-official" hole - a very Italian solution! - as thanks to local pressures the Italian military now "kinda-tacitly" allow through-the-hole access so people can visit the castle, picnic in the pinewoods, swim on the beach etc on weekends all year long, and I think all day and every day throughout July and August... which strikes me as a comparatively humane/civilized compromise.
Thankfully, there are also some lovely non-military "natural park-type" stretches of coast in this part of Italy, with beautiful sand-dunes, mediterranean scrub, pines etc., and as I love to go roaming around the coasts here I'll take more pics whenever I find somewhere really nice and post them for you to enjoy. But unfortunately a lot of the coast near Rome got heavily (and often illegally) built up during the 60s-70s... so far too much of the non-park-status, non-military-status coastline now looks like this:
Yuck. "Ignoring moralities is always undesirable, but doing so systematically is really worrisome." Mohammed Khatami
Heh, you got me... I was just about to ask :-) *Traitor*, n. A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.
It appears to have been unhealthy even in Roman times; according to Suetonius, both Augustus and Tiberius contracted here the illnesses which proved fatal to them.
It's NOT "unhealth" now, in fact very salubrious and prosperous... so Grrrr from me to Wikipedia, which should have a) made that clear!!! and b) if they want to drag both Roman and post-Roman corpses into their account of a coastal location + old tower, at least explain why the heck the area used to have such a life-threatening reputation in the first place. Quite simple really, wouldn't have taxed their gnomes' typing-patience: the area used to be wetlands called the Pontine Marshes. Along with the nearby coastal lagoons around Sabaudia, these marshes were breeding-grounds for mosquitos that carried malaria ... but thanks to massive swamp-drainage in the 30s + decades of large-scale national health campaigns, malaria as an endemic scourge has long been eradicated both from this area and from Italy as a whole. "Ignoring moralities is always undesirable, but doing so systematically is really worrisome." Mohammed Khatami
I like the "hole in the fence" solution. Very funny. Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. -Voltaire
