Island
Insula Ilva/Aethalia
Isola d`Elba
Listen to the story
Ilva, known to the Greeks as Aethalia, is the island of Elba off the Tuscan coast. The Tabula draws its distinctive outline but gives it no name of its own, and the words written beside it are hard to read, with one word running into the shoreline. Older research read them as Portus Longus in Naxo insula, the long harbour on the island of Naxus, a name found nowhere else. The Greek name came from the soot of its iron smelting, and Vergil praised its inexhaustible mines. The geographer Strabo tells of a harbour named after Jason's ship, the Argo, whose crew supposedly left the beach pebbles many-coloured.