Ventotene

Ventotene is three kilometers long, eight hundred meters wide, and almost flat, the smallest inhabited Pontine island. Volcanic in origin, it sits in the Tyrrhenian Sea southeast of Ponza and has roughly seven hundred year-round residents. The Romans used the island as a place of imperial exile: after the daughter of Augustus, it held her granddaughter Agrippina, then Octavia, Nero's first wife.

The harbor they cut into the tuff cliff is still one of the island's two working ports, a direct physical link between the ancient settlement and the modern one that still uses it. The neighboring islet, converted into a prison by the Bourbons in 1797, was reactivated under Mussolini, and between 1939 and 1943 held up to seven hundred political prisoners, among them a communist confined to the main island who wrote a founding text of European federalism on cigarette papers with two co-authors. A small flat island with no room for separation between its parts, Ventotene has functioned across the centuries chiefly as a place to put people the mainland wanted at a distance.