Taranto

• 1. Introduction

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  Taranto sits at the edge of the Ionian Sea, a city whose name carries echoes of myth: founded, the story goes, by the son of Poseidon himself, riding a dolphin through a shipwreck to shore. By 500 BC, this city on the heel of Italy held an estimated population of 300,000 people, placing it among the largest urban centres in the world. Today, Taranto still serves as Italy’s principal naval base and remains the second-largest city in Apulia, with a population of 185,909 as of 2025. What made this particular stretch of coastline, between two bays called the Big Sea and the Little Sea, so magnetic for three millennia of civilisation? How did a colony of outcast Spartans build one of the ancient world’s most powerful cities? And why, after all that grandeur, does Taranto now carry the burden of being one of the most polluted cities on earth?

• 2. The Exile Who Built a City

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  Taranto was founded in 706 BC by a group of people who had no legal right to exist in Sparta. Their story begins during the Messenian Wars, when Sparta faced a manpower crisis. Spartan authorities made an extraordinary exception: they allowed unmarried Spartan women to have children with Perioeci, free men who were not Spartan citizens. The intent was to produce more future soldiers. When the wars ended, those permissions were retroactively cancelled. The children, called the Partheniae, meaning sons of virgins, were stripped of their standing and ordered out of Greece forever.

  Their leader, Phalanthus, travelled to Delphi to consult the oracle before leaving. The oracle’s answer was characteristically cryptic, but it pointed toward the harbour at the heel of the Italian peninsula. So the Partheniae crossed the sea and arrived in Apulia, naming their new city Taras after the son of Poseidon and a local nymph. The symbol of the city, which persists on the modern city’s emblem to this day, shows Taras riding a dolphin sent by his divine father.

  The city they built grew quickly into a commercial power and a sovereign city of Magna Graecia, the network of Greek colonies across southern Italy. Its rise attracted traders, philosophers, and athletes who would leave their marks on ancient thought far beyond the city’s own walls.

• 3. Archytas and the Apex

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  Archytas of Tarentum, who lived from roughly 428 to 347 BC, was the kind of figure that other cities only produced once in a generation. He was simultaneously a philosopher, mathematician, astronomer, statesman, and commander-in-chief of the army. His political contemporaries and successors compared him to Pericles in Athens, though Archytas operated half a century later.

  The Tarentines elected Archytas as their strategos, their general, seven consecutive times. That required them to break their own law against successive appointments. The historical record notes he was allegedly undefeated in campaigns against the city’s southern Italian neighbours. His rule marked the apex of Taranto’s development and its recognised authority over the other Greek colonies of southern Italy.

  He was not alone in making Taranto an intellectual centre. Aristoxenus, born around 375 BC, became a peripatetic philosopher and the ancient world’s most significant writer on music and rhythm. Livius Andronicus, born around 284 BC, went on to become a foundational figure in Latin literature. Lysis of Tarentum, a philosopher of the fifth century BC, eventually became a teacher of the Theban general Epaminondas. The density of thinkers that Taranto produced in the classical period sets the city apart from almost any comparable urban centre of its size.

• 4. War Elephants and Surrender

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  The encounter between Taranto and Rome began as a contest for control of southern Italy and ended in submission. In 303 BC, Sparta sent Cleonymus, the brother of King Areus I, with mercenary armies to help Taranto against the Lucanians and the Roman Republic.

  The city’s most dramatic gamble came when it called in Pyrrhus, the Molossian king of Greek Epirus. At the battle of Heraclea, Pyrrhus deployed war elephants, a sight the Romans had never encountered before in battle. That shock yielded a victory, and a further Pyrrhic victory came at the battle of Asculum. But Taranto’s alliance with Pyrrhus could not hold indefinitely. The battle of Beneventum in 275 BC went against them, and Pyrrhus died in the Peloponnese in 272 BC. Taranto surrendered to Rome in that same year.

  The consequences of that surrender rippled through trade geography for generations. Rome connected the Via Appia directly to the port of Brundisium, modern Brindisi, which cut Taranto off from the centre of Mediterranean commerce. A city that had commanded the routes of Magna Graecia found itself bypassed by the infrastructure of the empire that had absorbed it. That demotion in the trade network foreshadowed a pattern Taranto would encounter again and again: moments of extraordinary power followed by structural marginalisation.

• 5. Painted Clay and Silver Dolphins

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  During the fifth and fourth centuries BC, Taranto struck its own coins. The denomination was a Nomos, a die-cast silver coin whose weight, size, and purity were controlled by the state. One face carried the image of Taras riding his dolphin; the reverse depicted a hippocamp, the mythological horse-fish hybrid that pulled Poseidon’s chariot.

  At the same time, Taranto became the centre of a major decorated pottery industry. Most of the vessels now classified as Basilican ware, a category of South Italian Greek pottery, came from workshops operating within the city during the fourth century BC. The artists who produced these works are almost entirely anonymous; none of their names survived antiquity. Modern scholars have assigned them nicknames based on the subjects of their paintings, the museums that now hold their pieces, or the individuals who first distinguished their hands from others. The Iliupersis Painter, the Lycurgus Painter, the Darius Painter, the Underworld Painter, and the White Sakkos Painter are among the names given to the recognisable artistic hands of Tarantine workshops.

  The vessels they made were typically large and elaborate, intended for mortuary use. They took the form of volute kraters, loutrophoroi, and fish plates, decorated in the red-figure technique, with figures left in red clay while the background was covered in black gloss, then overpainted with white, pink, yellow, and maroon slips. The floral motifs that distinguish these works, spiralling vines, roses, lilies, poppies, and acanthus leaves, set the Tarantine style apart from Athenian conventions. Many Greek myths are known today only through images painted on South Italian vases, because Athenian workshops seem to have depicted a narrower range of stories.

• 6. One Night in the Harbour

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  On the night of 11-the 12th of November 1940, the Royal Navy launched the first all-aircraft ship-to-ship naval attack in the history of warfare. Twenty-one Fairey Swordfish biplane torpedo bombers took off from an aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean Sea, operating under Admiral Andrew Cunningham. Their target was the battle fleet of the Regia Marina, anchored in the harbour of Taranto, under Admiral Inigo Campioni.

  The attack used aerial torpedoes despite the shallowness of Taranto’s harbour, a technical challenge that the British had specifically prepared to overcome. The Italian fleet, which had been considered a serious threat to Allied Mediterranean operations, suffered significant damage at anchor.

  The Battle of Taranto is studied in military history as a turning point in naval warfare, demonstrating that aircraft carriers could neutralise a battle fleet without their own warships ever coming within gun range. The harbour that had sheltered merchant ships in the age of Magna Graecia, and Roman galleys after that, had now become the site of a new kind of war.

• 7. Dioxin and the Steel City

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  In 1991, the Italian Ministry of Environment declared Taranto a high environmental risk area. The source of that designation was the industrial complex that had grown up around the city since the postwar period, most prominently the ILVA steel plant, part of the Riva Group.

  The numbers from the following years are stark. In 2005, the European Pollutant Emission Register estimated that dioxin emissions from the Taranto ILVA plant alone accounted for 83 percent of Italy’s total reported emissions. The city produces 92 percent of Italy’s dioxin and 8.8 percent of all dioxin in Europe. Between 1995 and 2004, rates of leukaemias, myelomas, and lymphomas in the city increased by 30 to 40 percent. Over 9 kilos of dioxin have been discharged into Taranto’s air by its factories. Grazing is banned within 20 km of the ILVA plant.

  In 2013, the plant was placed under special administration after its owner, the Riva family, was accused of failing to prevent toxic emissions that caused at least 400 premature deaths. The division between the city’s industrial economic base and its public health consequences is built into the landscape: 93 percent of Taranto’s pollution is produced by factories, and just 7 percent by the public. In 2014, the Italian National Institute of Emissions and their Sources placed Taranto third in the world for factory emissions, behind only Linfen in China and Copsa Mica in Romania.

  Since the special administration began, emissions of carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and dioxin have decreased, and animal species that had departed, including swallows, cranes, dolphins, seahorses, and coral reef communities, have returned to the area around the city.

• 8. The Two Seas Today

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  The physical geography that shaped Taranto’s history is still the thing that defines the city’s daily life. The Ponte Girevole, the swing bridge built in 1887 that stretches 89.9 metres across the navigable canal between the Little Sea and the Big Sea, is the hinge between old and new Taranto. When it opens for ships, the two halves of the city are physically disconnected.

  The Old City, built on an artificial island between the two water bodies, retains the street layout laid down in 967 AD when Byzantine forces under Nicephorus Phocas rebuilt what the Saracen troops led by the Slavic Sabir had destroyed in 927 AD. Its four main arteries run straight; the side streets were deliberately built narrow and winding to slow any invading army. In 1746, the entire population of Taranto lived within the Old City. By 2013, that same district held only 1,000 residents, while the wider city held more than 200,000.

  The Aragon Castle, built between 1486 and 1492 by order of King Ferdinand II of Aragon and designed by Francesco di Giorgio Martini, still stands at the edge of the canal. It replaced a 9th-century Byzantine fortress, was converted to a prison in 1707, reverted to military use under Napoleon, and now belongs to the Italian Navy and is open to the public. Excavations in the 21st century revealed the Byzantine foundations beneath it.

  The Little Sea, which is classified as a lagoon, is where the citri, underwater freshwater springs, mix with salt water to create the conditions that have made Taranto’s mussels famous since ancient Greek and Roman writers described them. The legal mussel beds have been relocated to the second half of the Little Sea following pollution tests on the first side. Taranto will host the 2026 Mediterranean Games, the fourth time Italy has staged that event.