City
Lacenium
Capo Colonna
Listen to the story
Lacenium was not a town at all but the Lacinian promontory, a cape on the coast of Calabria now called Capo Colonna. On the map the headland has slipped inland and wrongly taken over the pair of towers that belongs to neighbouring Croton, which is why a distance figure is missing nearby. The cape carried a famous sanctuary of Hera, worshipped by the Romans as Juno Lacinia, where Hannibal set up a bronze tablet in Punic and Greek in 205 BC. Most of its columns were hauled away around 1520 for the archbishop's palace in Crotone; one, over eight metres tall, still stands and gives the cape its name.