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LAZIO |
 
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| Latium is a mysterious land. It is a land of woods and pastures, hills and valleys, rivers and lakes, with as many as twenty-five nature parks and reserves. The land is washed by a blue sea, with a whole archipelago lying just a few miles off the coast. It is a harsh land, which only seems to be unknown. in its heart lies Rome, the Eternal City, which calls people from all over to see its Roman ruins, Renaissance squares and baroque churches. Rome is a compendium, illustrating the evolution of architecture from Roman times to the present day.
Latium is the region that surrounds the city with a frame that is all history and landscape. The landscape is history in its own right, the product of men and men's activities, their thoughts and their imagination, forming a symbiosis of landscape, history and art. Hills and gorges, karst caves and extinct volcanoes, cliffs and caves by the sea, are perhaps the most artistic aspect of the work of nature; solitary sanctuaries and tumble-down churches, dead towns and little villages perched on high spurs of tufa, poles of art and faith bear witness to man's ascendancy over the environment. And since man's work is commonly considered an art, we may say that, in the variegated and complicated territory of Latium, man compares well with nature, equalling its beauty. For dreamers there is the Latium of silence, the unspoilt Latium with its harsh slopes and ranges of hills, gorges and sudden plains. It is a very varied region, condensing in a single territory a vast range of aesthetic, artistic and naturalistic values. One of these values is the rediscovery of silence, in boundless but not infinite spaces. These are spaces characteristic of the less known identity of the territory, though it is no less essential and much more authentic.
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