LATIUM - The regional capital of Latium is Rome. Everybody knows it: the pull of the Eternal City is great and irresistible, the capital of the Christian world, the seat of the Papacy, the incomparable home of architectural and artistic masterpieces of the ancient world. Is it possible to resist the fascination of Rome? It may be difficult, but why not try to spend a few days "exploring" Latium? In this way you would discover a region of fascinating nature and environment, with an extraordinary variety of landscape: wide beaches, great pinewoods, mountains like Terminillo (an excellent ski resort), gentle hills and expansive plains. A region rich in artistic monuments that bring to mind the long and extraordinary history of this region in the most immediate fashion. At Tarquinia, Cerveteri and Tuscania, necropolises and museums bear evidence of ancient and mysterious Etruscan people (seventh to sixth centuries B.C.) who ruled central Italy before the rise of Rome. There are countless testimonies of the Roman and later historical eras outside Rome, in the other provinces of Latium and in the local centres: Rieti, Viterbo, Latina and Frosinone. It is enough to think of the splendid and grandiose Villa Adriana in Tivoli (where the renaissance Villa d'Este can also be found), the seventeenth-century Palazzo Barberini in Palestrina, and the Cathedral in Anagni. The same grandiose style of the Roman religion seems to be projected and duplicated outside Rome: in the abbeys of Montecassino, Casamari, and Fossanova and in the monasteries of Subiaco, places dear to Saint Benedict of Norcia. Latium, therefore, is not just Rome. And Rome is also Latium.