Long before Napoleon, the Greeks named Elba the smoky island for its furnaces
Elba is remembered as Napoleon's first prison, but its fame is far older. Ancient Greeks called it Aethalia, from their word for smoky, because iron furnaces smouldered along its shores. Etruscans and Romans mined it, and a mineral first identified there still carries the island's Latin name, Ilva.
The island lies 10 km off Piombino in Tuscany and about 50 km east of Corsica, the third largest in Italy after Sicily and Sardinia. It is the biggest surviving piece of a land bridge that once joined the Italian peninsula to Corsica. Geologically it is built from slices of ancient seafloor pushed up during mountain-building; later granite intrusions sent hot fluids through limestone, depositing iron-rich minerals, among them ilvaite, named after the island. The west is dominated by Mount Capanne, 1,018 metres high and nicknamed the roof of the Tuscan Archipelago, where mouflon and wild boar thrive despite tourists.
Legend gave it heroic visitors. Apollonius of Rhodes wrote that the Argonauts rested here, and the geographer Strabo claimed the mottled pebbles on the beach were stained by the scrapings from their bathing tools. The harbour now called Portoferraio was known in antiquity as the port of Argo. Real history brought a stream of masters: Etruscans, Romans after 480 BC, Ostrogoths, Lombards, Pisa, Genoa and the Appiani lords of Piombino. Barbary pirates ravaged it in 1544; Cosimo I de' Medici then fortified Portoferraio and renamed it Cosmopoli, and Philip II of Spain built two fortresses at Porto Longone in 1596.
Napoleon arrived aboard HMS Undaunted on 4 May 1814 after his forced abdication. He was nominal sovereign of the island, allowed a guard of 400 men, while French and British ships patrolled offshore. In just under ten months he pushed through a burst of economic and social reforms, then slipped away on 26 February 1815 with about 1,000 men, beginning his return to power. Afterwards the Congress of Vienna handed the island to Tuscany, and in 1860 it joined unified Italy.
In June 1944 French troops backed by British commandos took it from German forces in a battle made harder by poor intelligence and strong defences. Today about 31,362 people live there year-round, a number that swells each summer, and the cyclist Fausto Coppi trained on its roads late in his career; a roadside spring still bears his name.
Source: Elba
