This route begins at the tower, not at the dune. Torre Paola stands on the channel, where Lake Paola runs out towards the sea, at the foot of the Circeo. You arrive and look first at the masonry, then at the water of the channel, then at the promontory rising right behind. This is the park read from the coast: the tower is the first sign, the one that says where the still water ends and the rock begins. From here you do not turn back towards the town. You step onto the path.

Just past the tower the path takes to the scrub. The ground rises, the wind makes itself felt among the bushes, and the shore left below stays visible only in patches. This is not a climb to be timed. You walk in the thick of it, you come out onto a piece of rock, you go back into the shade. The park, from here, is no longer the postcard of the mountain seen from the lake: it is the undergrowth, the smell of mastic, the stride that shortens.

The lighthouse is the stop. Below lies the sea of the promontory, and the coast bends westwards, away from the dune where the walk usually starts. You lean against it, let the route pause for a moment, and look back at the stretch just climbed: tower, scrub, rock. Up to here you have come from below. From here on you go down, and the water you find again is no longer that of the open sea, but that of the lake.

You come back onto the still water. After the wind of the promontory, Lake Paola looks like another season: reed bed, boats, the mountain mirrored and no longer pushing. The descent ends on the shore and the stride grows long again. You follow the bank, look back towards the tower, and the loop makes sense. The park stretches out. Sea, scrub, then lake again, with the Circeo, from down here, back to being an outline.

The end is on the shore, on the dune that closes the lake off from the sea. The sand is high, the Circeo stays to one side, and the route that began on stone dissolves here, on the flat. There is no monument. There is the ridge of sand, the different sound of the water, and the sense of having come back to the strip that separates the two seas, the open one and the still one. The park, seen from the shore, ends like this: tower, path, lighthouse, lake, and finally the dune.