History Elba Island

Elba the Land of Iron and Fire

The most treasured possession of the island must be looked for under the earth. For more than 4000 years, generations of miners have excavated in search of, first copper, and then iron. Even the most antique name for the island, Aethalia (spark) was taken from the fires emanating from the iron reduction furnaces, which had to have been numerous when the Greeks crossed the water of the Tirrhenian Sea during their travels amongst the colonies of southern Italy and Marseille.

The mineralogical heritage of Elba, included in the charming towns and accompanied by the notable floristic and faunal exigency, is a part of an environmental context shaped by a geological history at least 400-500 million years olds, and that in the last 100,000 years has been mixed with and superimposed on the anthropic history of the territory.

The western world still didn’t know the power of Rome, but the entire Mediterranean knew that between Corsica and Etruria there was an extraordinary island rich with iron. And it was the Etruscans, the most refined of the Italian cultures, who were made their fortune from Elba.

The populating of the Elba land and the probable utilization of the minerals intensified in the Neolithic age and following Metal age. To detail something of what remains, there are: the Aeneolithic burial grounds in the grotto San Giovanni in Rio, the remains of a sub-Appennine culture if Capanne, and the legends of Ivan and the Argonauts, the first mythical Greeks to search for metals and the founders of Argo, the first Portoferraio.

Today there are remnants of iron waste and the remains of iron reduction furnaces found in Pomonte, S. Andrea, Capo Pero, and in numerous other locations on the Elban coast. And so, like the great masses of waste, that until the first world war, covered the necropolis of San Cerbone in Popolonia, the remains of Elban minerals discovered on Ischia and at Marzabotta indicate the importance of the iron and steel industry and mineral activity that was carried out during the Etruscan and Etruscan-Roman periods.

In the following centuries up to the present day, at least up until closure of the last mine in 1986, even if with mixed fortune, Elba continues the cultivation of the iron mines and granite caves, marking the towns indelibly and in good part motivating the history and traditions of this marvelous little piece of the planet called the island Elba.