Ponza historical timeline

Ponza has been populated since the Neolithic, but its principal centres arose under Volscian domination.

Who came first is disputed. Italian sources say the island was occupied initially by the Phoenicians, who used it as a trading station, and colonised in the eighth century BC by the Greeks — to whom a funerary hypogeum and, according to numerous historians, the aqueduct of Le Forna are attributable. English sources instead state that Ponza was first colonised by the Etruscans. The two accounts are not reconciled.

The name is disputed on the same scale. One tradition derives it from Pontius Pilate, whose family is said to have owned a grotto on the island that still carries his name — a story historians now doubt, because the name Pontia appears in Strabo's Geography, which pre-dates Pilate's birth. Pontia also means "land of bridges" in Latin, which would suit an island of natural arches. And the Greek derivation — pontos, meaning sea — is the one the Italian account prefers.

Ponza and the archipelago became a Roman colony in 312 BC, when the republic came to terms with the Volsci and created an allied colony.

Then comes the island's sharpest contrast with its mainland neighbour. In 209 BC, during the Second Punic War, Ponza was one of eighteen colonies out of thirty that supplied ships, men and wealth to support Rome. Circeii, 33 kilometres away, was one of the twelve that refused. Ponza's stance earned it tax relief from Rome until 89 BC, when, after the internal war waged by the Italic peoples, it acquired full Roman citizenship — making it a fundamental strategic point for control of the central Tyrrhenian.

What followed was prosperity on a scale hard to picture now. The island became a flourishing, populous town with numerous sumptuous patrician villas, and the population grew to almost 20,000. Augustus turned it into a place of exile for illustrious political figures, and it became a resort for Roman patricians all the same: they built an enormous villa with an attached theatre at Punta Madonna, still discernible though submerged, with the Grotte di Pilato visible beneath — caves that had nothing to do with Pontius Pilate, having been used for fishing.

Water was the island's industry. Several aqueducts were built, the largest running from Le Forna to Santa Maria, along with dams and numerous reservoirs, the Piscinae Limariae. Some were very large, and together with a few small springs they supplied the islanders, provisioned merchant ships, and watered the entire Roman fleet.

Shipbuilding developed too, on timber from the lush pine and oak woods of the archipelago — and brought about the island's first great deforestation.

With the decline of the empire, interest in the islands faded. In the Middle Ages Ponza remained a flourishing religious and commercial centre under Benedictine monks, who raised the abbey of Santa Maria; Pope Silverius died on nearby Palmarola in 537 and is still patron of the comune, celebrated on 20 June. The friars' work was all but undone when, from the ninth century, the island became the object of ferocious raids by Saracen pirates.

Only in 1202 did Ponza recover its former importance, through the bull by which Pope Innocent III re-entrusted the abbey of Santa Maria to the Cistercians. In 1233 that abbey was incorporated into the Basilica of Sant'Anastasia al Palatino in Rome. In 1322 the island passed to the dependency of the abbey of Fossanova. (The Italian source credits that transfer to a bull of Pope Honorius III, whose pontificate ended in 1227; the attribution cannot be right as printed, so the pope is not named here.)

Its waters saw battles. In 1300 Roger of Lauria, Duke of Calabria, defeated the admiral Corrado Doria, in the pay of Frederick III of Aragon, king of Sicily. In 1435, during that year's siege of Gaeta, the Genoese admiral Biagio Assereto, fighting for the Angevins, defeated the fleet of Alfonso I of Aragon. But in 1454 the Aragonese occupied Ponza and drove the Cistercians out; they took refuge at Formia and founded the church of Santa Maria di Ponza.

In 1542 Charles V, king of Spain and emperor, granted the island in fief to Pier Luigi Farnese, with the obligation to defend it from pirate attacks — which never entirely ceased. In 1534 the Saracen Khair-ad-Din, known as the pirate Barbarossa, had put the island to fire and sword; in 1552 a fresh raid by the corsair Dragut brought death and destruction; and in 1655 the Turks raided again and blew up the tower at the port. In 1584, under Philip II of Spain, it was established that the Pope had no right over Ponza or the other islands.

After a brief Austrian garrison, in 1734 Elisabetta Farnese, mother of Charles III of Spain, king of Naples, ceded the whole Pontine archipelago to her son. He made the islands private property of the crown and began an intense colonisation, bringing in settlers above all from Ischia. In 1757 a fleet of Neapolitan ships, joined by Maltese and papal war galleys, defeated a group of Turkish vessels off Palmarola, and from then the archipelago was safe.

The population that resulted is the one still here. Ponza was colonised by 52 Ischian families, 130 people in all, after standing practically uninhabited for some two centuries because of the Saracen raids — and the present inhabitants of Ponza descend precisely from those families. (The Italian source places them in the seventeenth century, inside a passage describing a Bourbon programme it dates to 1734; the century and the programme do not match.)

In 1768 King Ferdinand IV began improving the islanders' economic conditions. Technicians were sent to direct the works, which lasted until 1793 and were carried out by several hundred convicts serving life — who in 1795 were shut up in the island's new prison.

In 1808 Napoleonic troops under Joachim Murat took the Pontine islands from the Bourbons. In 1813 the English occupied Ponza under admiral Charles Napier, who was created count of the island; two years later the Treaty of Vienna returned it to the Bourbons.

In 1857 the patriot Carlo Pisacane reached Ponza, having seized the Cagliari, a steamer shuttling between the Sardinian capital and Genoa. Arriving on the afternoon of 27 June, he freed the prison inmates, went with them to Palazzo Tagliamonte and destroyed the island's archive, then reconstituted his expedition against the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. It ended tragically after the landing at Sapri on 28 June.

The island stayed under Bourbon control until Garibaldi's men occupied it on 7 November 1860, and in 1861 Ponza was annexed to the Kingdom of Italy.

In 1928 the fascist regime designated Ponza a place of confinement for political opponents. Among the many sent here were Giorgio Amendola, Lelio Basso, Pietro Nenni, Mauro Scoccimarro, Giuseppe Romita, Pietro Secchia and Umberto Terracini. Mussolini himself was then a prisoner on the island from 27 July to 7 August 1943.