The beautifully preserved ruins of Ostia Antica, Rome’s ancient seaport, lie twenty miles from the modern metropolis, in the meadows between the Tiber River and the Tyrrhenian Sea. Founded, probably in the 4th century BC, as a military colony to guard the river mouth against seaborne invasions, Ostia served as a busy commercial port when Rome controlled all the Mediterranean in the 2nd century BC.
