Anzio and Nettuno: The Landing, and What Is There Now

Anzio and Nettuno are two towns on the Tyrrhenian coast about 60 kilometers south of Rome, joined end to end, with a train from Rome Termini that takes a little over an hour. On January 22, 1944, Allied troops came ashore here in Operation Shingle, and for four months the fighting on this flat ground was some of the hardest of the Italian campaign. Today the beaches are lined with bathing clubs, the cemeteries are among the quietest places in Lazio, and a visitor with a morning and an afternoon can see most of what there is.

What happened at Anzio?

The Allied VI Corps landed on a fifteen mile stretch of beach behind the German line, intending to cut the supply routes to the Gustav Line and open the road to Rome. More than 36,000 men were ashore by midnight. The Germans contained the beachhead instead, and for four months the troops held a strip of flat, wet ground under artillery fire, including shells from a railway gun the soldiers named Anzio Annie. The breakout came in late May, and on June 4, 1944 Americans entered Rome.

Our guide to WWII sites in Italy covers the campaign as a whole, including the casualty figures and the argument about whether the landing was worth it. This article is about the ground itself.

Can you still see the battlefield?

Partly, and it takes some explaining, because the beachhead is not a landscape that reads like a battlefield.

It was a plain: reclaimed marshland, drainage ditches, umbrella pines, farms built in the 1930s. The fighting ran through fields and along canals rather than over hills, which is why photographs of Anzio look like nothing in particular. Most of that plain is now suburbs, greenhouses and roads. What survives is the shape of the coast, the pine woods inland, and a set of markers and small memorials placed where units fought.

The most legible ground is between the two towns and the modern coastal road, where the beaches themselves are unchanged in outline. Standing on the sand at Anzio and looking inland gives you the distance the troops had to cross and the flatness they had to cross it in, and that is the thing no museum reproduces.

The railway gun is not here. One of the two German K5 guns that shelled the beachhead was captured, shipped to the United States, and is now in the US Army's ordnance collection in Virginia, which is an odd afterlife for the loudest object in this story.

The Anzio Landing Museum

The museum sits in Villa Adele, a seventeenth century villa a few minutes on foot from Anzio station, and it is run with a local seriousness that is worth respecting: uniforms, weapons, documents and photographs of the American, British, German and Italian soldiers who fought here, laid out without spectacle.

As of 2026 admission is free and visits can be booked. It is open from 10 to 1 and from 4 to 6 in the afternoon between September and June, with the afternoon shifted to 5 to 7 in July and August, and it is closed on Mondays and Wednesdays, which catches out a lot of visitors. Check before you plan the day around it.

The cemeteries

The Sicily-Rome American Cemetery is at the north edge of Nettuno, a ten minute walk from the station. It holds 7,845 American war dead in arcs of headstones under Roman pines, with 3,095 names of the missing on the chapel walls, and a bronze rosette beside a name means that person has since been recovered and identified. Most of those buried here died in Sicily, at Salerno, at Anzio, or in the air and naval support of those operations. As of September 2026 it is open every day from 9 to 5, closed only on December 25 and January 1, and admission is free. Staff in the visitor building will take a relative to a specific grave, and the American Battle Monuments Commission can place flowers on a grave and send a photograph to a family that cannot travel.

The Commonwealth cemeteries are two, and they are often confused. Beach Head War Cemetery, inland, holds 2,316 Commonwealth burials from the Second World War, 295 of them unidentified. Anzio War Cemetery, about a kilometer north of Anzio beside the town's own cemetery, holds 1,056. Both are cared for by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, both are open without a ticket, and both are almost always empty.

The German dead of this sector were moved to the German war cemetery at Pomezia, about half an hour north on the Pontina road, which holds 27,443 soldiers, 3,770 of them unidentified. Of those, 3,751 were exhumed from the ground of the beachhead itself.

Nettuno, which is not only a cemetery town

Nettuno has a walled medieval quarter above the sea, a compact grid of stone lanes and arches inside walls broken by round towers of the fourteenth century, and it is one of the pleasant surprises of this coast. At its edge stands Forte Sangallo, built between 1501 and 1503 by Antonio da Sangallo the Elder, square, low and blunt, of the generation of forts designed for cannon rather than for archers. It houses a museum of the landing and a collection of antiquities from the area, open on weekdays from 9:30 to 12:30 and from 3:30 to 6:30.

Anzio before 1944

Anzio was Antium, a Roman resort where the emperor Nero was born in AD 37 and where the remains of his seaside villa still lie between the lighthouse and the old port. Two famous statues came out of this ground, and the town has been a place Romans go to swim for two thousand years, which is more or less what it still is.

The port is working and unpretty in the best way: fishing boats, ferries to the island of Ponza in season, and fish restaurants along the quay. Both of Anzio's beach fronts, Levante and Ponente, held the Blue Flag for water quality in 2026. Our guide to beach towns near Rome puts this coast in order, from Ostia down to Gaeta.

How to do Anzio and Nettuno in a day from Rome

Direct regional trains leave Rome Termini for Anzio, about 65 minutes, and continue to Nettuno, about 70. Both stations are in the towns, no bus needed.

A workable day: morning train, the museum at Villa Adele first (remembering the Monday and Wednesday closures), lunch by the port at Anzio, then the walk or a short taxi to the American cemetery at Nettuno in the afternoon, when the light is long and the place is at its best, and the medieval quarter and the fort afterward if there is time. By car it is about an hour from Rome and easier to add the Commonwealth cemeteries, which are awkward on foot.

Come in spring or fall. In July and August this is a beach town at full volume, which is not the wrong thing but is a different thing.

If the trip is about someone in particular

Take the unit and the dates with you, and find out first whether the person you are following is buried or named in Italy. Our guide to WWII sites in Italy for American families explains how to check, and our guide to visiting Monte Cassino covers the other half of the winter of 1944, eighty kilometers inland, where the same armies were stuck against the Gustav Line.

Journeys built around a family's own history are what our history and memory days are for, and we plan them one at a time: tell us who you are looking for in Design your trip.