Lazio
Lazio is the region that contains Rome, which means it carries an almost unreasonable weight of history — but step outside the capital and the pressure lifts. You find painted Etruscan tombs at Tarquinia, a tuff-rock town called Civita di Bagnoregio that is slowly dissolving into the valley below it, and a Renaissance garden at Tivoli where water still runs through channels Hadrian's engineers imagined two thousand years ago.
This is a region that has been at the centre of things for so long that the ordinary and the extraordinary sit side by side without ceremony. A rationalist city built on drained swampland in 1932. A necropolis older than Rome itself. The fountains of Villa d'Este still running.
Experiences you don't want to miss
How Lazio came to be
Long before Rome existed, the Etruscans buried their dead in vast necropolises at Cerveteri and Tarquinia — cities of the dead that now sprawl across 20 hectares of UNESCO-listed ground. Rome grew from a cluster of settlements on seven hills above the Tiber around 753 BCE, and from there absorbed the region, the peninsula, and eventually most of the known world. Augustus divided Italy into administrative regions; the southern part of modern Lazio became Region I, Latium et Campania.
After empire came papacy. The Donation of Sutri in 728 gave the Church its first territorial foothold beyond Rome, and for much of the medieval period Viterbo — not Rome — served as the papal seat. Italian unification arrived on 20 September 1870, when troops entered Rome during the reign of Pius IX, and Lazio joined the Kingdom of Italy. The region's current shape was fixed in 1927, when territory from Umbria and Abruzzo, including the province of Rieti, was folded in.
Who and what shaped it
People who shaped it
Landmark buildings
See Lazio in motion
Plan your visit
On the map
When to go
Summers in Lazio are hot and dry, particularly in Rome and the low-lying plains — inland hill towns offer some relief. Spring (April–May) and autumn (September–October) bring mild temperatures and lower crowds, making them the most practical windows for covering ground across the region. Winters are cool and occasionally wet but rarely severe.
Right now
↡ Cities
No places match these filters.
Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.