The History of Elba

The Greeks called it Aethalia — «spark». It was no metaphor: at night, from the sea, you could see the glow 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 both an open-air mine and a forge: Elban ore travelled to Populonia, on the coast opposite, where the furnaces burned day and night. Mountains of slag remain there — so rich in iron that, three thousand years later, they were smelted all over again.

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: at Le Grotte, above the bay of Portoferraio, you can still see the terraces, the cisterns and the tanks for farming fish.

After Rome, Elba passed from hand to hand — Ostrogoths, Byzantines, Lombards — until in the Middle Ages it entered Pisa's orbit. The Republic 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, who in 1544 had put it to fire and sword. Within a few years the village of Ferraia became a Renaissance fortress-city, ringed by ramparts held to be impregnable: Cosimo named it Cosmopoli, «the city of the cosmos» — today's Portoferraio.

Portoferraio aside, for two centuries Elba stayed a divided island. The Appiani, lords of Piombino, had held it since 1399; the Grand Duke of Tuscany held Cosmopoli; and from 1603 Spain occupied Porto Longone — today's Porto Azzurro — fortifying it with the mighty Forte San Giacomo. Three flags on a single island.

These were the years of the Barbary raids: after Barbarossa, in 1553 the corsair Dragut ravaged the Appiani lands. To defend themselves, the coast filled with watchtowers. One, cylindrical, still stands on the seafront of Marina di Campo: documented from the late 1500s, it watched over the very beach where people sunbathe today. Beside it rose a chapel for the garrison — and from there, little by little, the town was born.

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: he laid out roads, revived the mines, reordered the administration, and even gave it a flag — white and red with three golden bees — that Elba still uses.

He lived between the Palazzina dei Mulini, overlooking the sea 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 the Polish countess Maria Walewska joined him in great secrecy. 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. It was also the age of workers' struggles, of the first strikes and of a proud mining community.

The Second World War reached here too: on 17 June 1944, with Operation Brassard, French units landed on the very coast of Campo to silence 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.