of Rome with Capua, in Campania. In 293 BC the road was paved in saxum quadratum up to Bovillae. Later it was extended to Benevento and then to the Greek port of Brindisi. In the eighteenth century, Giovanni Antonio Ricci suggested the existence of a municipium which he called "Alba Media" on the site of Albano., but this theory conflated the evidence from another localities of the same name: Alba Pompeia (modern Alba) and Alba Fucens. Ricci was thoroughly confuted in the following centuries, and it is now established that until the time of Domitian, the stretch of the Appian Way between Bovillae and Aricia (modern Frattocchie in Marino and Ariccia) was completely free of buildings, as shown by Tacitus Histories 4.2 on the Year of the Four Emperors (69) and the final phase of the civil war between Vitellius and Vespasian, which states that the army of Vitellius was camped partially at Bovillae and partially at Aricia, indicating that there was nothing in between the two centres which were themselves in decline. Domitian, second son of Vespasian became Emperor in 81 and immediately dedicated himself to an ambitious project: the construction of an imposing Imperial villa in the Alban Hills to replace the villa previously used by various Emperors (dating to Tiberius), which is probably the same as the villa attributed to Pompey the Great and located in the Villa Doria, now a part of the imperial patrimony. The new villa, the Villa of Domitian was a true palace, located inside the modern Villa Barberini, near Castel Gandolfo, in the extraterritorial zone of the Papal Palace of Castel Gandolfo, on an estate containing a series of villas, already Imperial property for various reasons, with an area of 13 or 14 square kilometres, abutting Lake Albano and perhaps also Lake Nemi. The villa was frequently used by Domitian, but it later fell into disuse, on account of the construction of the more famous Villa of Hadrian at Tivoli by Hadrian (117-136), who also began a policy of selling surplus Imperial property, including some of the villas on the edge of "Albanum Caesarum". Septimius Severus to Philip the Arab The Villa of Domitian at Castel Gandolfo was probably garrisoned by a detachment of the Praetorian Guard when the Emperor was in residence, although documents, archaeology, and epigraphy provide no explicit testimony of this residence. The archaeologist Giuseppe Lugli has, moreover, confuted