POPULONIA, an ancient seaport town of Etruria, Italy (Etruscan Pupluna), at the north end of the peninsula of Monte Massoncello, at the south end of which is situated the town of Piombino (q.v.). The place, almost the only Etruscan town built' directly on the sea, was situated on a lofty hill now crowned by a conspicuous mediaeval castle and a poor modern village (Popu lonia). It commands a fine view, and Corsica is sometimes visible, though not Sardinia, as Strabo (and following him, Lord Macaulay) erroneously state. Considerable remains of its town walls, of large irregular, roughly rectangular blocks (the form is that of the natural splitting of the schistose sandstone), still exist, enclosing a circuit of about I2 m. The remains existing within them are entirely Roman—a row of vaulted substructions, a water reservoir and a mosaic with representations of fishes. Strabo mentions the existence here of a look-out tower for the shoals of tunny-fish. There are numerous tombs outside the town, from the Villanova period (9th century B.c.) to the middle of the 3rd century B.C. Under heaps of ancient slag removed for resmelt ing at the present day, a considerable number of chambered in humation tombs of the 8th-7th century B.C. have been discovered;
all were originally covered by circular mounds of earth ; the roof was a false dome, formed by the projection of each course of stones beyond the one below it. The remains of a temple, devas tated in ancient times, were also found. The iron mines of Elba, and the tin and copper of the mainland, were owned and smelted by the people of Populonia ; hot springs too lay some 6 m. to the E. (Aquae Populaniae) on the high road—Via Aurelia—along the coast. At this point a road branched off to Saena (Siena). Ac cording to Virgil the town sent a contingent to the help of Aeneas, and it furnished Scipio with iron in 205 B.C. It offered consider able resistance to Sulla, who took it by siege ; and from this dates its decline, which Strabo, who describes it well, already notes as beginning, while four centuries later Rutilius describes it as in ruins. The harbour, however, continued to be of some importance, and the place was still an episcopal see under Gregory the Great.
See A. Minto, Populonia (Florence, 1922) for a full description.