Gaeta

It was natural and seemly that the young king should seize the opportunity offered by his northward voyage to proceed to Rome and there pay his respects to his guardian, the Pope.

Accordingly, he sailed from Palermo to Ostia, stopping only once on the journey at Gaeta, and made his way up the Tiber to Rome.

The meeting which followed between Frederick and Innocent seemed of happy augury for the future peace of Christendom.

The youthful monarch was complacent and respectful.

[aplaude] Specialmente ai partecipanti al corso di aggiornamento in diritto canonico promosso dalla Pontificia Università della Santa Croce.

Alla Guardia di Finanza di Predazzo, Gaeta, Orvieto e Bari.

[aplaude] All'Accademia Militare di Modena.

Al gruppo Preghiere delle mamme.

It was natural and seemly that the young king should seize the opportunity offered by his northward voyage to proceed to Rome and there pay his respects to his guardian, the Pope.

Accordingly, he sailed from Palermo to Ostia, stopping only once on the journey at Gaeta, and made his way up the Tiber to Rome.

The meeting which followed between Frederick and Innocent seemed of happy augury for the future peace of Christendom.

The youthful monarch was complacent and respectful.

It was natural and seemly that the young king should seize the opportunity offered by his northward voyage to proceed to Rome and there pay his respects to his guardian, the Pope.

Accordingly, he sailed from Palermo to Ostia, stopping only once on the journey at Gaeta, and made his way up the Tiber to Rome.

The meeting which followed between Frederick and Innocent seemed of happy augury for the future peace of Christendom.

The youthful monarch was complacent and respectful.

They overran Apulia and Calabria, notwithstanding the resistance of the popes, and proceeded to wrest Sicily from the hands of the Saracens.

They destroyed three centers of independence which shone conspicuously on that part of the Mediterranean coast which has too often been the seat of tyranny and oppression—the republics of Naples, Gaeta, and Amalfi, the last of which demands our special reverence.

The traveler who visits the little fishing town squeezed in between the mountains and the sea, affording a mere niche of vantage on the iron-bound coasts between the great harbors of Palermo and Naples, finds it difficult to imagine that he sees the site of a republic which probably invented the mariner's compass, which was among the first to give laws to the commerce of the sea, and which preserved with superstitious reverence the sacred copy of the Pandects from which the knowledge of the Roman law in the Middle Ages is said to have been derived.

These southern republics disappeared forever.

Charles persuaded him to create twelve non-Italian cardinals of whom seven were French, and this act of weakness was the final cause of the transference of the papal see to Avignon.

At last, on December 13, 1294, he resigned the pontificate with the consent of the cardinals.

Ten days later, a successor was elected in the person of Benedetto Gaetani, who took the name of Boniface VIII.

Celestine had up to the time of his abdication resided at Naples, but Boniface compelled him to accompany him to Rome.

Yet though his spiritual influence was so great that after his death he was canonized as a saint, he was fated to end his life in disappointment and failure in a struggle for temporal power with the Norman lords of Apulia.

In the early 11th century the Greeks still ruled Apulia from their capital Bari, and the republics of Naples, Amalfi and Gaeta recognized their overlordship.

But the Lombard duchies of Benevento, Capua and Salerno had thrown in their lot with the Western Empire and the Roman Church, while the Saracens of Sicily kept up a constant series of harassing attacks on Greek and Lombard alike.

The distracted state of southern Italy made it a land of promise for the warlike and adventurous Normans, descendants of the Scandinavian Vikings, who were sure of a welcome and of employment as mercenaries on one side or another.

In Italy the spiritual revival was more mystic in character and influenced individuals rather than communities.

Devout and sensitive men, shocked at the profligacy around them, withdrew into the wilderness and dwelt as solitaries or in congregations of hermits in mountain caves or in wild and lonely places where they gave themselves up to meditation and to penitential observances.

Such were St. Nilo the Calabrian hermit, whom Otto III visited in his retreat near Gaeta, and St. Remuald of Ravenna, the founder of the hermit order of the Camaldoli, who tried to win Otto III for the monastic life.

Such too was the Tuscan noble San Giovanni Gualberto, who in 1039 founded the order of Vallambrosa, of whom it was told that the sculptured Christ upon the cross had bent toward him in approval when he spared his brother's murderer.

So today, I wanna do this deep dive here.

We're gonna leave the museum behind and travel through the landscape itself, beginning in Sperlonga and moving towards Gaeta, the nearby town, lots of amazing things there, and Formia.

And I'll take you a little further afield as well because there's another great Odyssey landmark along the coast that we can't ignore, Monte Circeo, with traditionally associated with Circe.

Now, before we set off, I wanna make one distinction really clear because I think it makes the story a lot more interesting.

The grotto was transformed into an extraordinary dining and entertainment setting, and those are archeological finds.

And then there are places that centuries of tradition have associated with Homer and the travels of Ulysses, and that's something different.

Nobody can prove that Ulysses sailed into the Gulf of Gaeta or that a particular spring was the Artacha described by Homer.

In fact, we can't even prove that Ulysses was an historical person.

And so they sent me to, to Italy and I arrived in, uh, Napoli, Naples.

And then they said, well, but you have to go to Gaeta, you know, which is about an hour up, up, uh, at the coast from Naples.

So I went in there and, uh, as luck would have it, the ship wasn't there that I was supposed to be on at the time it was the USS Belknap.

So they said, well, here's some money.

But I would say within, within 24 hours of being in Italy, I said, wow, I, I love this place.

And, uh, and that was it.

It took me 24 hours, but, um, How I became a historian, it actually, the origin story was a couple years later when I had transferred from Gaeta back to the NATO base of Naples.

And I had always heard about the Atlantis of Italy because everybody kept talking about it.

The validity of Joanna's will was contested by Alfonso, who hurried from Sicily to defend his kingdom while the Pope declared that on the failure of the heirs of Charles of Anjou, the crown of Naples reverted to him as a papal fief.

The Duke of Milan took the side of René against Alfonso and sent a Genoese fleet to defend Gaeta against the attacks of Alfonso.

The Aragonese fleet was defeated in August 1436 off the island of Ponza and Alfonso and his brother John, King of Navarre, and the chief of his barons were taken prisoners.

They were conducted first to Genoa and then to Milan, where Alfonso, by his ability and charms, completely won over the capricious Filippo Maria.

He was liberated on parole in April 1432, but not wishing to break his faith as a knight or to sacrifice the hostages which were being retained for him, he returned of his own free will to prison in May 1433 and remained there for three years, not being able to obtain his liberty without paying a large sum of money.

He now arrived at Naples on May 19, bringing with him his eldest son John, and on Ascension Day, May 22, he rode through the city in triumph.

From this time a struggle of varying fortunes continued between the two rivals, René being generally established at Naples and Alfonso at Gaeta.

René proposed to settle the quarrel by single combat, an offer which Alfonso scornfully rejected.

They were enormous sculptural compositions.

In 1957, during construction of the Via Flaca, which is the coastal road connecting Terracina and Gaeta, an extraordinary collection of marble fragments came to light.

More than 15,000 fragments were eventually recovered.

Those fragments belonged to monumental sculptural groups depicting episodes associated with Odysseus.