Lazio

Pretty sure.

And just for the ones in Rome, for example, because I think some of you might go traveling through Rome, I think 1 and 2 East, Est, if you will, are specifically for like, it's like a Lazio Umbria or something like that.

Oh, okay.

It is...

Teline are tiny clams that live just beneath the sand in shallow water.

And there's something I immediately associate with summers on the Lazio coast.

So we'd be standing in the water with our newly acquired friends, chatting away, and at the same time, we'd move our heels through the sand beneath our feet.

Every now and then, you'd feel something hard.

I see Sperlonga as it is today, but at the same time, I can see myself all those decades ago, walking in from the beach, looking at the tomatoes, buying fish, and wondering what I was going to make for lunch.

Now, if you've never been to Sperlonga, I should describe the town itself.

Sperlonga is a little over 100 kilometers south of Rome, on the Lazio coast between Rome and Naples.

The historic center rises dramatically above the sea on a rocky promontory.

There's a few examples of this.

The one you're thinking of is the Posto Fibreno trout, which is actually, it's on the border of Lazio and Abruzzo in this little lake, and it's a salmonid.

And there was a geological event six million years ago or so, the Mycenaean salinity crisis, when the entire Mediterranean dried up, which is amazing.

Gibraltar and Africa fused together.

Well, I think quite an easy first stop could be somewhere like Pescaceroli, which is only about an hour and a half from Rome, deep into Abruzzo.

It's a lovely town.

It's the sort of heart of the national park of Lazio Abruzzo Molise.

It's really well organized for excursions, for tours, for bear watching, for wolf watching, e-bike trips, everything like that.

in other cities in the area of Rome at the very earliest period of Roman history.

So that they were a kind of, the area around Rome is known as Latium, the Latin territory.

It looks as if they were found in Latin territory even before Rome became Rome.

So other towns would

We think it is almost as old as Rome itself.

So at least in the apocryphal tales that are told about Rome's foundation, it seems to be the case that cities in the Latium region all have their own Vesta cult.

And part of the reason that we can tell this is that we get this story for the foundation of Rome, Romulus and Remus.

And Romulus and Remus's mother is in some cases positioned as a Vestal Virgin.

A lot of the endemic fish species in Italy, which numbers quite a large number.

I can't remember precisely how many, but I think something like the Posto Fibreno trout, which is a trout found nowhere else in the world, only in this one lake in southern Lazio, is due to its isolation.

It's due to this, you know, the rivers not joining up with it suddenly.

And it's suddenly being just, just locked up in this one Lake.

But again, it had been reduced to an absolute fraction.

Tiny population had been completely hunted out.

And the remaining few were left in Abruzzo, Lazio, Molise National Park.

But over the years, the careful protection and management and reintroductions means that it's now returned to Sibilini, Gran Sasso, Maela, further south, I believe, in the Pollino area.