History of the Pomonte Valley
The Pomonte Valley was home to ancient settlements, and the modern-day name of the village may even derive from the Latin Post Montem, 'beyond the mountain', although several experts also attribute it to the medieval Pedimonte, 'at the foot of the mountain', clearly referring to Mount Capanne, the name having subsequently transformed into 'Pemonte' and then 'Pomonte'.
The earliest settlements, however, predated the Romans, as demonstrated by findings of copper and bronze artifacts dating back to the relative cultures, whose existence on the island appears to date to the period between around 2000 BC and 800 AD, discovered mainly in the valley's higher localities such as Le Mura, Campitini and San Bartolomeo. Subsequent human activity during Etruscan and Roman eras is also documented, not only by the said place name but also by two shipwrecks in the sea below the valley and the quantity of slag produced through reduction of Rio Marina iron ore found along the coast.
After exhausting the majority of the forests of western Elba, given the large quantity of charcoal gobbled up by the smelting furnaces, people then began using timber from Mount Capanne.
It is not until the Middle Ages, that the Comune Pedemontis municipality is mentioned, under the jurisdiction of Pisa. Due to the danger of Saracen raids, the inhabitants moved to higher ground, and the main settlement was probably located on the site of the ruined oratory of San Benedetto in the La Terra locality, 460 metres above sea level, where the remains of several dwellings have been found. More remains of ancient buildings are found in the wide Pomonte Valley, including the oratories of San Biagio, San Frediano and San Bartolomeo, in a place called the Oppito, also noted by Professor G. Monaco.
A major landslide in October 1990 from the valley's eastern elevations uncovered the remains of ancient metalworking activities linked to iron ore reduction.
Fortunato Pintor, in his Nel Dominio Pisano nell'Isola d'Elba (under Pisan rule on the Island of Elba) of 1898, referring to the terrible damage inflicted on the population by the plague of 1348, informs us that 40 Homines (householders) remained in the municipality of Pomonte. Pisa intervened at that time to alleviate the hardship for the people of Elba by lowering taxes.
The population must have suffered an even worse fate in the 16th century when Ottoman pirates, led by Barbarossa and then Dragut, wiped out the settlement, literally razing it to the ground.
It was not until the 19th century that the modern-day village of Pomonte, near the sea, re-emerged, first as an agricultural centre and now as a residential and tourist hamlet, following completion, in the mid 1960s, of the road that loops around Mount Capanne.
(Antonello Marchese, translation from Italian)