Montagna Spaccata and the Grotta del Turco historical timeline

The history of this place starts in a shallow tropical sea and ends with a staircase being shortened for safety. The cliff is Cretaceous carbonate rock, lifted out of the water by the collision of two continents and then broken; the Montagna Spaccata is one of those breaks -- a fault, with movement between its sides, as Regione Lazio's park authority states plainly. Everything built here was built into that crack, and the thing a visitor stands in front of is the fissure itself, with a sixteenth-century chapel wedged in it on a rock that fell in 1434.

Chronology

1. c. 135 Ma Carbonate beds accumulate in a shallow, clear Cretaceous sea, in conditions comparable to the Bahamian coral platforms, as algae, molluscs and single-celled organisms fix calcium and their hard parts settle with the mud. These are the limestone and dolomite layers now stacked in the cliff face.
2. c. 65 Ma The African and Eurasian plates collide and orogeny begins, raising the marine sediments first as islands and then as mountain chains, with uplift, compression, overthrusting, folding and fracture. Monte Orlando is the seaward end of the chain it produced, and the fractures are visible along the whole cliff.
3. 22 B.C. The mausoleum of Lucius Munatius Plancus, consul in 42 B.C., is built at the top of Monte Orlando, within the grounds of his villa over the gulf. The cylindrical travertine monument stands 13.20 m high and 29.50 m across and is still there, in a clearing at 168 m.
4. 1000s Benedictine monks build the sanctuary of the Santissima Trinità in the cleft. It is on record from the eleventh century, and the complex that carries the name today grew from it.
5. 1434 A boulder breaks away from the ridges above and jams between the walls of the second fissure, above the grotto's entrance from the sea. It is still wedged there, holding a chapel.
6. 1500s The Cappella del Crocifisso is built on that boulder, reached by a staircase cut down into the fissure. Descending it is how a visitor sees the Latin distich and the Mano del Turco on the right-hand wall.
7. 1528 Andrea Doria, admiral of Charles V, defeats a French fleet in the waters off Gaeta and hands the city to the emperor, which is followed by a new and more extensive wall taking in Monte Orlando. Military building on the promontory continues from here to the Second World War, and the bastions, powder magazines, munitions depots and gun emplacements are scattered through the park.
8. c. 1850 The Bourbon kingdom reafforests the promontory, which is why pines and downy oaks grow among the holm oaks of the north-west wood. In the same years Raimondo Bruno paints the Madonna and Sant'Erasmo entrusting Gaeta to the Holy Trinity, the canvas now over the high altar.
9. 1800s The Alcantarine fathers restore the sanctuary. The Baroque single nave with its lunetted barrel vault and side chapels is the face they gave it.
10. 1967 The homeport of the US Sixth Fleet flagship moves to Gaeta and support facilities are established on Monte Orlando. The NATO base on the promontory has since been transferred to a shore-based facility, and the military ground it occupied is inside the park.
11. 1986 Regional law 47 of 22 October places the area under protection, after petitions from environmental associations and a large number of citizens. It becomes a Parco Regionale Urbano, now 59 land and 30 marine hectares under the Ente Parco Riviera di Ulisse.
12. 2016 Regional law 17 of 31 December renews the protection. The park authority that publishes the landslide-risk register, runs the guided canoe trips to the Grotta del Turco and states that the sanctuary is freely visitable operates under it.

Survival and restoration

Nothing here has been restored so much as managed around. The rock keeps moving: a block fell in 1434 and became a foundation, and the park now maintains a published register of areas at risk of landslide inside Monte Orlando. The one visible consequence for a visitor is the Grotta del Turco's staircase, which used to descend all the way to the water and was shortened for safety reasons. The shortened route still reaches the point where the light off the waves is the whole effect; the rest is reached by canoe, which the park runs trips for.

The building has been handled lightly. The eleventh-century Benedictine foundation was restored by the Alcantarine fathers in the nineteenth century, which produced the Baroque interior now standing, and the high altar is twentieth-century. The sanctuary is held by the missionaries of P.I.M.E. and admission is free.

What the protection has actually saved is on the cliff face. The dwarf palms here are the last of a continental European native population to escape being dug up for private gardens; the inaccessibility of the falesie preserved a vegetation almost unaltered, including an Aleppo pine that recent study has shown to be native and Asplenium petrarchae, a fern living in the smallest fissures. Fires before protection shaped the low maquis, and most of what grows there now regenerated from burnt stools.

• Wikipedia