A region with a very bulky city in it
Six million people, and more than half of them live in a single city. The rest is emptier than you would think.
Lazio is hard to describe because Rome sits in the middle of it. Four and a half million people live in the metropolitan city, and all the rest of the region holds barely a million and a half spread over a territory the size of Campania. The practical consequence for a traveller is that half an hour from the ring road you are already in real countryside, with empty roads and villages of three thousand people.
How it is put together
From north to south you cross three different pieces. The Tuscia, above Rome, is tufa country: round lakes inside craters, Etruscan necropolises, villages built from the same stone they stand on. In the middle is Rome with its countryside, its aqueducts and the Castelli. To the south the Pontine plain, drained in the nineteen thirties, and behind it the Lepini and Ausoni mountains, which drop straight into the sea between Terracina and Gaeta.
The coast
Three hundred and sixty kilometres, nearly all sand. To the north, towards the Maremma, the beaches are wide and little built up; around Rome, between Ladispoli and Ostia, they are where the city goes and in summer they are packed; to the south, from Sabaudia to Gaeta, is the best part, with the Circeo dunes, the headlands and cleaner water. The Pontine islands lie offshore and are reached by ferry from Formia, Terracina and Anzio.
Rome in winter, the sea in summer, the lakes when Rome becomes unbreathable.
The calendar of the people who live here
How to plan it
If the trip is for Rome, pick a campsite in the northern or southern ring with a shuttle or a train: you park once and you never take the vehicle into the city. If the trip is for the sea, the base is south of Circeo. If you want cool air and quiet, the lakes of Bracciano and Bolsena have campsites on the shore, and Rome stays an hour away.
One thing to reckon with is traffic: the Grande Raccordo Anulare is the ring road of an entire region, and on holiday return days it stops. Anyone in a motorhome should avoid crossing Rome and keep well round it.