An island in Lazio with no bars and no roads, lying six nautical miles from Ponza, the best-known of the Pontine Islands. Zannone, a tiny outcrop within the Circeo National Park, remains uninhabited, green and mysterious, with red-earth footpaths, free-roaming mouflons, and a reputation its landscape gives little hint of.
From Ponza’s colourful harbour, boats take less than an hour to reach the dark silhouette of Zannone, which closes off the northern horizon of the Pontine archipelago. While Ponza is home to hotels, trattorias and bars, Zannone keeps its mouflons, Cistercian ruins and lingering rumours of aristocratic orgies all to itself.
One day, two stories
From Ponza, visitors can join a day trip organised by local boatmen or booked through the national park. Landing takes place at the small cove of Varo, the island’s only authorised access point. From there, an ochre-coloured path climbs through Mediterranean scrubland to the ruins of the Cistercian monastery atop Monte Pellegrino, before descending past the basins of a Roman peschiera (fish farm) carved directly into the rock.
On the return journey, boats circle the island, stopping frequently for swimming and snorkelling sessions in coves accessible only by sea. Yet behind this picture-postcard excursion lies another story, far less innocent.
The illegal villa
In the 1930s, a white colonial-style villa appeared above the wooded slopes, built without permission on a Roman archaeological site. In the 1960s, the Italian state leased it to Marquis Camillo Casati Stampa di Soncino and his wife, the stunning actress Anna Fallarino.
Far from the mainland, this emblematic couple of Roman high society entertained lavishly. Every weekend, yachts brought noblemen, millionaires, politicians and starlets to the island for mouflon hunts, banquets and costume parties. Barely 100 kilometres separate Rome from this tiny island, making it the perfect hideaway for an aristocracy eager to indulge away from prying eyes.
Stories tell of midnight swims in the peschiera, highly liberated games, and a voyeuristic marquis who photographed his wife with her young lovers.
The island of orgies
It was one such relationship that brought this chapter to an abrupt end on 30 August 1970. For years, the arrangement devised by the marquis involved personally selecting his wife’s lovers and recording everything in a diary, portions of which were published after his death. Everything unravelled when Anna fell in love with one of them: twenty-five-year-old Massimo Minorenti.
On 30 August 1970, Camillo telephoned the family’s Roman apartment from a hunting trip and heard the young man’s voice. He rushed back via Puccini, dismissed the household staff, locked himself inside with the two lovers, and emptied his shotgun into them before taking his own life.
The affair, quickly dubbed the Casati Stampa murder, dominated Italian newspaper headlines and revealed what had been taking place on Zannone, which soon acquired the label of 'the island of orgies'.
Mediterranean scrub, mouflons and a unique lizard
After this tragic burst of notoriety, Zannone returned to its unusual routine. On this remote and difficult-to-access rocky island, nature is now the only permanent resident.
Since 1979, the island has been classified as a strict nature reserve within the Circeo National Park. It serves as a refuelling stop for thousands of migratory birds, including cranes, storks, cormorants, ibises, marsh harriers and peregrine falcons, all of which take advantage of its vegetation cover during their journeys.
Within the Mediterranean scrub, a colony of mouflons introduced at the beginning of the twentieth century, together with a small endemic lizard found nowhere else in the world, complete the island’s wildlife. Across its hundred hectares, the vegetation combines holm oaks, broom, myrtle, prickly pear cacti and agaves.
A wild cousin of Ponza, the island allows visitors a brief glimpse of its charms for a day, before sealing away its secrets once more as the last boat heads back towards the mainland.
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