Monte Argentario

The Argentario was an island, and it stopped being one without anyone putting it there. Sea currents and the river Albegna built over the centuries two tomboli, that of the Giannella and that of the Feniglia, two tongues of sand that tied the island to the mainland and in doing so enclosed the lagoon of Orbetello between them. The name appears for the first time as Promontorium Argentarium in a poem of the fifth century, the De reditu suo of Rutilius Namatianus, who described his own voyage along the Etruscan coast. Where it comes from, however, is not clear, and the source admits as much: the idea that there was silver here is generally excluded, since of silver mines there is no trace; some think of the shine of the mica-rich rocks, which from the sea make the promontory look silvery; others of the argentarii, the Roman bankers of the gens Domitia, who owned these lands and who according to one account had obtained them in exchange for money lent to the Republic during the Punic wars.

The promontory keeps a memory far longer than its own. In the Grotta dei Santi excavations have yielded archaeological levels between forty-eight thousand and forty-four thousand years old, attributed to Neanderthal man, who hunted here and exploited the resources of the coast. Not far off, in the Argentarola cave, the concretions have allowed scholars to reconstruct some two hundred and fifteen thousand years of sea-level oscillation: the same water that would later build the two isthmuses left its own archive inside there. The territory is all hills and in places rough, softened only by terraces made by hand for the vine and the olive; the sun beats down for more than seven hours a day on average, one of the highest figures in Italy, and since 1991 the waters around belong to the cetacean sanctuary.