Pontine Marshes

The range then passed behind the Alban group, but reappeared to the southeast as the mountain crescent of Cora and Promizia.

enclosing between its horns the Pontine Marshes which lay spread out below as far as the sea-line, extending east and west from Terracina in the Bay of Fondi, the Volscian Anxer, to the angle of the coast where rises suddenly between the marshes and the sea the mountain promontory of Circei, celebrated alike in history and in fable.

Within the space visible from this one point the destinies of the human race were decided.

It took the Romans nearly five hundred years to vanquish and incorporate the warlike tribes who inhabited that narrow tract, but this being accomplished, two hundred more sufficed them to complete the conquest of the world.

And very strange was this shrill but drowsy chorus, this voice of the darkness and the desert.

"The Pontine Marshes," said Alice.

"Do you hear the frogs? Do you smell the sulfur?" "Pontine Marshes," I repeated, and a sense of grandeur and of desolation came upon me.

"But why have you brought me here, to this gloomy, forsaken place? Let us fly to Rome instead." "Rome is near," answered Alice.

"Prepare yourself." We sank lower and flew along an ancient Roman road.

Here and there, both on the river and in the fields, other lights were glimmering, whether close at hand or far away, the eye could not distinguish.

They shrank together, then suddenly lengthened out into great blurs of light.

Grasshoppers innumerable kept up an unceasing churr, persistent as the frogs of the Pontine marshes, and across the cloudless but dark lowering sky floated from time to time the cries of unseen birds.

Yeah, so the marshes of Rome, that was in, um, I believe in 1691.

Uh, as early as 1691, there was a dragon that, uh, kind of roamed the Pontine Marshes outside of Rome.

And they, you know, would harass the locals, uh, and they would, uh, essentially this publication, again, it was from 1691, would publish the accounts of this large winged dragon that would harass these marshes.

Uh, and they even s- claim to have found the skeleton of the surviving dragon.