Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Elba and Elsewhere
This nearly submerged peak, whose hills are iron and its valleys farms, is ancient in its years. The Romans found in its red ore the metal for their spear-heads. For two thousand years its forges sent out the material for the tools of war, and now its furnaces smoke unceasingly in a vast industry of iron and steel where the converters are turning out steel billets and iron to the extent of seven hundred and fifty thousand tons a year under the guid ance of a hand trained in America, Fritz Glein, of johnstown, Pennsyl vania, whose wife, once a Pennsylvania schoolma'am, is the sole American on the island.
But the furnaces are alone in their 2modernity. They border on a moat built by Lorenzo de' Medici, and the Medicean castles frown down upon an unchanged town. Eight thousand souls dwell in Porto Ferraio, in houses that are centuries old, walking streets and terraces paved by the Florentines, while the landing-portal bears the Me dicean mark of 1624, and the customs guards inhabit La Torre detta di Pas sanante, a bastion at the sea-gate of rare architectural beauty, in itself an adequate memorial of the wonderful Genoese, the last masters of the island before Napoleon came.
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