- chapter 40: Seafaring –
If one excludes Populonia, the only polis of Etruria located on the sea and which had its
own port adjacent to the city with a landing and two docks at the foot of the promontory
on which stood the settlement (see Strabo 5.2.6 C 223), all the other cities were located
at some distance from the coast and their ports were completely separate, standing along
the coast, according to the strategies of the population that were evaluated so positively
in a famous passage of Aristotle’s Politics (7.4).
The loss of the periplus (a written account of a sailing circuit) of Etruria in the portolan
attributed to Scylax of Caryanda (cf. § 17) has deprived us of an important source for
understanding the panorama that Etruria offered during the course of the Late Archaic
period. Only the periplus of Etruria by Pomponius Mela (Chorographia 2.65) records for
the Etruscan coasts the ports of Pyrgi, Minio, Castrum Novum, Graviscae, Cosa, Telamon,
Populonia, Caecina, Pisa; but if the presence of Telamon (modern Talamone) along the
coast, on a promontory at the northern shore of the estuary of the Osa, which disappeared
during the civil war between the Sullans and Marians in the years between 82 and 80
bc, provides a secure terminus ante quem for the chronology of this situation, the landscape
described by Mela is one that was created by the Romanization of the region and is, in
substance, comparable to the text of Strabo and to the maritime geography of the ports of
Etruria in the Augustan period offered by Virgil’s listing of the maritime allies of Aeneas.
Yet the evidence of the fi nds permits us to recognize many harbors along the coast of
Etruria and ports of some importance, sometimes located near the mouths of rivers and
streams. For each polis was linked to an epineion (“seaport”), sometimes fl anked by landings
and/or minor ports in a complex system of infrastructures that mark the relationship of
the various cities with the sea.
This is the case of Cerveteri, which from the fi rst Archaic phase maintained its principal
port at Pyrgi, 13 kilometers distant from the city and connected to it by a monumental
roadway, built in the fi rst half of the sixth century bc, and which was complemented
by the ports of Alsium to the south, near modern Palo, and of Punicum in the north,
corresponding to the town of Santa Marinella. Similarly, at the opposite end, just before
the Ligurian Sea, in the case of Pisa, at one time distant from the shore by 20 stadia
(Strabo 5.2.5 C 222), or less than four kilometers, within a structured landscape hemmed
by lagoons – very different from today – and marked by the courses of the Arno and the
Auser, there existed a complex system of ports and minor landings directly linked to the
city and to some extent controlled by it, distributed along the coast of the Tyrrhenian
Sea from the mouth of the Fine in the south to the area in the north where, in around
177 bc, Luni was founded. Alongside some minor landings, ground surveys have made
it possible to glimpse from the Archaic period on a port district in the area of the early
medieval basilica of San Piero a Grado near the mouth of the northern branch of the
Arno, a site that seems, albeit with changes, and in its surroundings still partly obscure,
to have preserved the character of the fi rst ports of call of the Tyrrhenian routes related to
Pisa in Roman times. In fact, a tradition that dates back to the Carolingian period fi xed
in this location the fi rst landing of the Apostle Peter on his voyage to Rome in 42 or 61
ad. A second epineion, known in modern antiquarian literature as “Porto delle Conche,”
must have been situated to the north, at the mouth of the Auser, to which must be
related the harbor located in the north-west of the settlement that was brought to light
by the excavations begun in 1998 and still in progress, in the area of the railway station
of “Pisa – San Rossore.” Beginning with the end of the fourth–beginning of the third
century bc, a third port comes to mark the extension of Pisa over the sea, nine miles