Lavinium

Lavinium was an ancient city in Latium, four kilometers inland from the coast at modern Pratica di Mare. Legend credits its founding to Aeneas, the Trojan hero and mythic ancestor of the Romans, who named it after his wife Lavinia. In Rome's founding era Lavinium was the chief religious center of the Latin League; Roman consuls journeyed here each year to sacrifice to the Penates and Vesta. From the 1950s archaeologists uncovered a 6th-century-BCE sanctuary with thirteen aligned altars and in 1968 the so-called Heroon of Aeneas, a 7th-century-BCE earthen burial mound. The Museo Civico Lavinium in Pomezia displays the finds today.