brought back to Rome when her older sister Agrippina the Younger became influential as Claudius' wife. Another distinguished lady of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, Claudia Octavia, who was the first wife of the emperor Nero, was banished to Pandateria in 62 AD and then executed on the orders of her husband. This is also the island to which St. Flavia Domitilla, the granddaughter of the emperor Vespasian, was banished. Twentieth Century A prison camp was created under the Bourbons and restructured under Benito Mussolini on the nearby island of Santo Stefano. There, up to 700 opponents, including 400 communists, were incarcerated between 1939 and 1943. One of them was Altiero Spinelli who wrote there a text now known as the "Ventotene Manifesto", promoting the idea of a federal Europe after the war. During World War II, the island served as home to a 114-man German garrison, which defended a key radar station. On the night of December 8, 1943, an American PT boat slipped into Ventotene's harbor undetected and offloaded 46 American paratroopers from the 509th Parachute Infantry Battalion, led by U.S. Naval Lieutenant (and actor) Douglas Fairbanks Jr., who was tactical commander of the Beach Jumpers—a group that used all forms available of deception to deceive the enemy, and commando-trained. The paratroopers met with a local exile from the Italian mainland who then lied to the German commander that there was a regiment of paratroopers on the island, deposited by a fleet of Allied ships. Terrified, the German commander demolished his positions, weapons, and quickly surrendered to the weaker American force before realizing his mistake. Ventotene was liberated at 3 AM without a shot being fired. The story is reported by John Steinbeck in Once There Was A War. In August 2016, the Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi met with the German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Hollande on Ventotene, to lay a wreath at the tomb of Altiero Spinelli and review European Union policy in the light of the impending British withdrawal from the EU. Environment Nature Reserve Ventotene and Santo Stefano are both part of a nature reserve created in 1999 in order to preserve the ecological, geomorphological and naturalistic-environmental characteristics and to promote activities compatible with the conservation of the reserve's natural resources. This means that new buildings cannot be erected, and reconstruction is limited. Marine Reserve The marine reserve, which covers a 10 km