Museum ARCHAEOLOGICAL PARK OF BARATTI AND POPULONIA / Acropolis

Along the Etruscan Coast of Tuscany, on top of a promontory of extraordinary beauty in the Gulf of Baratti, the ancient Populonia was one of the main centres of the Etruscan and Roman Civilization. Today, the archaeological park of Baratti and Populonia preserves the ruins of the only example of Etruscan city to be built along the sea.

In the 8th-9th Century B.C.important houses were built on the Acropolis to accommodate the most ancient aristocracies of Populonia. From these houses there remains faint and picturesque traces on the summit of the acropolis, not distant from the monumental structures of another Populonia, the Roman one which around the 2nd Century B.C. built important temples, thermal spas and sanctuaries right in the heart of the city.

The name Fufluna (or Pupluna) derives from Fufluns, the Etruscan God of the wine. During the VI and the IV century BC, Populonia becomes the main iron and steel site of the Mediterranean Coast thanks to its strategic position along the Coast in an area rich in minerals. Here, the inhabitants processed the hematite from the close Elba Island and the other minerals from the vein of Campiglia, to produce objects in iron. Then, these handmade products were shipped by boat to the other civilization along the Mediterranean Sea, as the ancient Greece and North Africa.

Later, around the II century BC, Romans conquered Populonia because of the iron they needed, especially for military reasons. The rest of the temples, paved streets and of a villa at the Acropolis of the Archaeological park of Baratti and Populonia, prove that the city was rebuilt in “Roman Style”.

A network of itineraries joins up the city of the houses and temples to the industrial city and the necropolises which lie on the first hills surrounding the inlet. As in ancient times, the routes follow the original roads, crossing the woods and the Mediterranean scrub and opening up to unexpected views alternating over the Gulf of Baratti or the open sea and the Island of Elba. 

One of these routes leads to another landscape, that of Medieval times. Among the woods of the promontory, the remains of the Benedictine monastery of San Quirico tell of a lost city and a renewed interest for the natural resources and minerals of the region.