Lake Nemi: wild strawberries, Roman ships and the best view in the hills

Diana's mirror

Nemi is the smallest and the most secretive of the volcanic lakes south of Rome. The Romans called it speculum Dianae, the mirror of Diana, because the sacred grove of the goddess stood on its shore and the water reflected it.

The village sits on the rim, a hundred metres straight above the water, and it is essentially one street ending in a terrace. From that terrace you look down into a perfect green bowl with a dark disc at the bottom. There is no better view in the Castelli Romani, and it costs nothing.

It is fifteen minutes from Castel Gandolfo and about fifty from Rome.

The ships of Caligula

In the first century AD the emperor Caligula had two enormous ships built on the lake — floating palaces with marble floors, heated baths and bronze fittings, moored rather than sailed. They sank, and lay in the mud for nineteen centuries while people fished up fragments and told stories.

In the 1930s the lake was partly drained and the two hulls were recovered intact, the largest ancient ships ever found. A museum was built on the shore to hold them. In 1944, during the German retreat, the ships burned.

What remains is the Museo delle Navi Romane on the lakeside: the hall, full-size models, and the surviving bronzes and fittings. It is a museum about an absence, and it is more moving than most museums about a presence.

The strawberries

Nemi is famous throughout Italy for fragoline di bosco — tiny wild strawberries grown on the crater floor, intensely perfumed and nothing like the fruit sold under the same name elsewhere.

They are in season from late spring into early summer, sold in small baskets by women in the village, and eaten with cream or lemon. Every bar on the street will serve you a bowl.

The Sagra delle Fragole, the strawberry festival, fills the village on a Sunday in early June. It is genuinely local and genuinely crowded — worth planning for or planning around, depending on your taste.

The village

There is little to visit in Nemi, and that is the appeal. Palazzo Ruspoli, a medieval castle turned residence, anchors one end. The street is lined with balconies and flowers, the terraces are cut into the rim, and the whole place takes twenty minutes to walk and two hours to leave.

Down at the lake there are a few restaurants and a path along part of the shore. The road down is steep and beautiful.

Where the sacred grove was

On the northeastern shore stood the sanctuary of Diana Nemorensis, one of the strangest cults of the ancient world: its priest, the rex Nemorensis, was a runaway slave who won the office by killing his predecessor in single combat, and held it until someone killed him.

James Frazer opened The Golden Bough with this lake, and the whole edifice of modern comparative mythology was built on it. The excavations are modest and largely closed, but you are standing on the ground.

When to go

Late May and June for the strawberries, which is the reason most Italians come.

September and October for the light and the quiet, when the crater turns and the village is empty.

Weekday afternoons always: Sunday belongs to Roman families.

How it fits the day

Nemi is not a full day. It is the second half of one.

Morning on the Appian Way and at Castel Gandolfo, lunch by Lake Albano, then the rim road across to Nemi in the afternoon for the terrace, the strawberries and the museum. From there it is twenty minutes to the ridge at Tusculum for sunset over Rome.

That circuit — three craters, two lakes, one sunset — is the best day out of Rome that does not involve a monument.