Our second trip into the lesser known areas of Lazio takes us into the Monti Lepini, a straggling rocky chain of hills some 60 kms south of Rome between the Apennines and the Mediterranean.

For many centuries people believed that the enormous walls surrounding the buried city of Norba in the Monti Lepini hills had been built by the Cyclopes, the mythical one-eyed giants described by Homer in the Odyssey; it seemed impossible that the colossal stones could have been cut and raised by normal men. The walls, built without cement or mortar, encircle an archaeological site extending over 38 hectares on a high plateau that dominates the Pontine plain and have withstood 2,500 years of wars, calamities and neglect, continuing to inspire awe today. Strangely, however, Norba and its post-Roman