The History of Elba

The Greeks called it Aethalia — spark. It was no metaphor: at night, from the sea, you could see the fires of the Etruscan furnaces smelting the ore of the eastern side. From here came the purest iron in Europe, the metal that armed and built the ancient Mediterranean.

For the Etruscans, Elba was an open-air mine and a forge: Elban iron travelled to Populonia, on the coast opposite, to be worked and traded across the ancient world.

Under Rome the island — Ilva, to the Latins — kept giving iron and began giving granite: Elban columns and blocks left for the empire's building sites. And Roman patricians were the first to discover the island's holiday vocation, building sumptuous villas over the sea in the bay of Portoferraio.

In the Middle Ages Elba entered Pisa's orbit, which quarried its granite for its churches and left Romanesque parish churches and fortifications. This is when the hill villages were born — San Piero, Sant'Ilario, Marciana — perched high to defend against raids from the sea.

In 1548 Cosimo I de' Medici was charged by Emperor Charles V with defending the island, scourged by the corsair raids of Khair ad-Din Barbarossa. The village of Ferraia became a Renaissance fortress-city: Cosimo named it Cosmopoli, «the city of the cosmos» — today's Portoferraio.

A few decades later the Spanish settled the opposite side, fortifying Porto Longone — today's Porto Azzurro — with the imposing Forte San Giacomo, still overlooking the gulf.

In May 1814 Napoleon Bonaparte landed in Portoferraio as an exile — but with the title of sovereign of the island. In ten months he truly governed it: roads, mines, administration, even the flag with three golden bees that Elba still uses.

He lived between the Palazzina dei Mulini, above Portoferraio, and the Villa di San Martino in the countryside; at the end of August he climbed to the sanctuary of Madonna del Monte above Marciana, where he met the Polish countess Maria Walewska. On 26 February 1815 he sailed secretly for France — the Hundred Days, and Waterloo, were weeks away.

Between the 19th and 20th centuries the eastern mines — Rio, Calamita — became an industry: thousands of miners, blast furnaces in Portoferraio, Elba's iron in Italy's steel.

The Second World War reached here too: on 17 June 1944 the Allies landed on the very coast of Campo, silencing the German battery at Capo Poro — its emplacements are still visible along the lighthouse trail, half an hour on foot from our homes.

In the 1950s Italy's first modern ferry — christened, fittingly, Aethalia — opened the island to the world: liveried barmen, crystal glasses, and Elba turning from an island of miners into an island of holidays.

The mines closed in 1981, and the island chose protection: the Tuscan Archipelago National Park in 1996, the Pelagos Sanctuary for marine mammals in 1999. Meanwhile, in 1986, Locman was born in Marina di Campo — proof that fine craftsmanship here never stopped.