Gaeta Culture

Gaeta's culture is layered in a way that few Italian coastal towns match, because all its layers are still active.

It is a working fishing port. It is a seaside resort. And it is a military town — NATO has a naval base here — which gives a comune of nineteen thousand people a permanent population that has nothing to do with tourism.

The military identity is not new. The city has played a conspicuous part in military history, and its walls run from Roman times through the fifteenth-century extensions made especially during the history of the Kingdom of Naples.

The Roman inheritance is aristocratic rather than civic: this was a coast of villae maritimae, the earliest luxurious retreats of the Roman elite, and the names attached — Scipio Africanus, Augustus's stepfather, Mark Antony's admiral — are of owners rather than citizens.

There is also an environmental identity the town has earned recently and repeatedly: blue and green flags from FEE in 2025, for the twelfth consecutive year.

And the unresolved name is itself a cultural fact: Strabo, Diodorus, Virgil and Dante all have a claim on it.