ABSTRACT
Shortly before the middle of the eighth century BC some Greeks decided to settle on the island of Ischia, which they came to call Pithekoussai, off the bay of Naples. This wasn’t the first time Greeks had been in the area: Mycenaean pottery has been found at the western tip of the small island. But, to the best of our knowledge Greeks had not been present there during the eleventh, tenth, or ninth centuries. Settlement there in the middle of the eighth century follows renewed contact between Greece and Italy. The earliest signs of such contact come at the end of the ninth and beginning of the eighth century in the Tiber valley, where Greeks came across Etruscan communities which, both in material culture and in social formation, were at least as sophisticated as the Greeks themselves. Settling at Pithekoussai gave the Greeks a staging post for further contact with the Etruscans and with other people in the area.
