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Island of Elba in Tuscany - The Minerals

The crystal-clear blue water and the intense green Mediterranean bush dominating the hinterland have determined the recent tourist popularity of the Island of Elba. MBut the most precious treasure of the island must be sought underground; this is why for 4000 years miners have come to the island to excavate first for copper then for iron. Even its most ancient name (Aethalia=spark) derives from the fire bursting out of the ovens for the reduction of iron and these must have been already many when the Greeks sailed in the northern Tyrrhenian Sea from the colonies in southern Italy to Marseilles. Before Rome became the most powerful city of the western world, the island between Corsica and Etruria was already well-known in all the Mediterranean for its extraordinary ore body. In fact, it is also thanks to the Island of Elba that the Etruscans became one of the finest Italian civilizations.

The island has always seemed so rich of minerals that since antiquity there has been the legend of inexhaustible mines. For centuries the abundance and purity of the Elba hematite has been the background to its human and historic events, but in October 1981 the last iron mine was closed. After centuries of intensive exploitation, the Elba mines are no longer the working place of miners, but are visited by mineral collectors and researchers. Many old miners know the “tricks of the iron”. With these words they indicate the crystals with stange shapes and colors. Micaceous hematite from Elba with its characteristic roselle crystals is present in all important mineral museums and it was by studying hematite and quarz from Elba that during the 17th century N. Stenone discovered the laws of modern crystallography.

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