City
Caieta
Gaeta
Listen to the story
Only a drawing marks Caieta, today Gaeta on the Italian coast. Its name has dropped out, and the position alone points to the harbour town. The picture itself is curious: a second hand seems to have begun turning the usual pair of towers into a farmstead, then stopped after a few strokes. The road link to neighbouring Formiae is missing too. The Roman poet Virgil said the place was named after Aeneas's nurse, buried here, while the Greek geographer Strabo derived it from a word for shallows. Cicero praised its harbour as famous and crowded with ships, and the emperor Antoninus Pius restored it.