Short answers, pulled from the story.
Taranto was founded in 706 BC by Dorian Greek immigrants from Sparta known as the Partheniae, sons born of unmarried Spartan women and Perioeci during the Messenian Wars. Their leader Phalanthus consulted the oracle at Delphi before leading the exiles to Apulia, where they named the city Taras after the son of the sea god Poseidon.
Archytas, who lived from roughly 428 to 347 BC, was a philosopher, mathematician, astronomer, statesman, and commander-in-chief of the Tarentine army. The people of Taranto elected him strategos, or general, seven consecutive years, breaking their own rule against successive appointments; he was allegedly undefeated in military campaigns. His rule marked the apex of Taranto’s power and its recognised supremacy over other Greek colonies in southern Italy.
On the night of 11-the 12th of November 1940, twenty-one Fairey Swordfish biplane torpedo bombers launched from a British aircraft carrier attacked the Italian battle fleet at anchor in Taranto’s harbour. The operation, directed by Admiral Andrew Cunningham, was the first all-aircraft ship-to-ship naval attack in history. The Regia Marina, commanded by Admiral Inigo Campioni, suffered significant damage from aerial torpedoes fired despite the shallowness of the harbour.
In 1991 Taranto was declared a high environmental risk area by Italy’s Ministry of Environment, primarily because of the ILVA steel plant, part of the Riva Group. A 2005 European estimate found the plant responsible for 83 percent of Italy’s total reported dioxin emissions; the city as a whole produces 92 percent of Italy’s dioxin and 8.8 percent of Europe’s. Between 1995 and 2004, rates of leukaemias, myelomas, and lymphomas in the city increased by 30 to 40 percent.
Taranto mussels are grown in the Little Sea, where underwater freshwater springs called citri mix with salt water, oxygenating the water and promoting plankton growth. This unusual salinity creates a flavour that has been praised since ancient Greek and Roman times, and the mussels appear on the Italian Ministry of Agricultural, Food and Forestry Policies list of Traditional Food Products. Legal mussel cultivation has been relocated to the second half of the Little Sea following pollution tests on the first side.
The Taranto Prize, also called the Biennial of the South, was a biennial cultural event held between 1947 and 1951. It was created by veterans returning from World War II who gathered in the Cultural Club and the newspaper Voce del Popolo, with coordinator Antonio Rizzo, a physicist who had studied under Enrico Fermi. Artists and writers of international standing, including Pier Paolo Pasolini, Carlo Emilio Gadda, and Giorgio de Chirico, participated; the theme of the competition was the sea.