Itius Portus or Portus Itius, an ancient Roman name for a port in Nord-Pas-de-Calais, of unknown location. The main candidates have been Wissant and Boulogne, more usually called Gesoriacum, and later, Bononia, but a silted-up lagoon on the Flanders shore behind Calais now seems most likely.
Caesar
described calling ships ad portum Itium to embark troops for Caesar's invasions of Britain to Britain in 54 BC. It was certainly near the uplands roundCap Gris Nez, but the exact site has been violently disputed ever since the Renaissance. Many critics have assumed that Caesar used the same port for his first expedition, but the name does not appear at all in that connection. This fact, coupled with other considerations, makes it probable that the two expeditions started from different places. It used to be generally agreed that he first embarked at Boulogne. The same view was widely held about the second, but T. Rice Holmes in gave strong reasons for preferring Wissant, 4 miles east of Gris Nez. The chief reason is that Caesar, having found he could not set sail from the small harbour of Boulogne with even eighty ships simultaneously, decided that he must take another point for the sailing of the more than 800 ships of the second expedition. Holmes argues that, allowing for change in the foreshore since Caesar's time, 800 specially built ships could have been hauled above the highest spring-tide level, and afterwards launched simultaneously at Wissant, which would therefore have been commodissimus or opposed to brevissimus traiectus. In fact the logical place to assemble 800 or so ships was in the large lagoon behind a coastal fringe of islands because in Caesar's day an estuary stretched all the way inland to the site of the modern townSaint-Omer. In 1944, French historianAlbert Grenier, against the backdrop of Allied invasion of Normandy, reanalysed Caesar's text against modern understanding of wind, weather, tides, and siltation in the English Channel. He concluded Caesar's departure ports were likely to be Boulogne, Wissant, and Quentovic. All would later become important as Roman ports. The English side of the Channel also had many places that were Roman-era ports but were now far inland because of silting.
Subsequent invasions
's abortive invasion of Britain c. AD 40 was probably to have departed from Boulogne. The Romanlighthouse which once stood there is believed to have been built by him. Boulogne is presumed to have been the point of departure for the conquest of Britain of 43 under Aulus Plautius, although the only surviving account of the invasion, that of Cassius Dio, does not mention it. The emperor Claudius followed later with reinforcements, and Suetonius tells us he sailed from Gesoriacum.
