But the Riviera also holds a legendary appeal for Romans, who remain loyal to summer vacations in the area. When I first moved to Rome in my early 20s, I remember hearing about it from my landlord, who used to wax poetic about Sperlonga, and the mother of one of my students, whose boyfriend had a summer home in Circeo, as she called it. Curious, I took the train to Sperlonga for a day trip with friends, and remember gazing down at the beach in awe. But it wasn’t until I moved back to Rome after an eight-year stint in New York City that I became a regular visitor.
Driven by tales told by friends and colleagues, whose faces took on a dreamy glow as they recounted stories of summers spent there, I booked a room at the Hotel Chiaia di Luna on Ponza for a weekend away with the man who would become my husband. What I found was a place with the beauty of the Amalfi Coast as it was in the 1950s and ‘60s: rocky outcrops where people laid their towels down to sunbathe and dive off the rocks into the glittering turquoise sea, little family-run restaurants serving spaghetti with clams, pastel buildings overlooking the port.
That dreamy trip to Ponza whet my appetite for the area. Curious to see the rest of the Riviera, I’ve gone back every summer, choosing a different town to stay in for the weekend and soliciting tips from various friends and acquaintances. In Gaeta, Daria Reina and Andrea Ferolla, who run the chic concept shop Chez Dede, sent me and my husband to the beach club where they had a season pass. A steep descent from the Via Flacca brought us down to the beach, where rows of orange-and-yellow umbrellas dotted the soft, golden sand and the water was the most breathtaking shade of aquamarine. Reina has been summering in Gaeta and Formia, the next town over, for decades and knows the area like the back of her hand.
