Tavolara Island
Encyclopedia
Tavolara is a small island
Island
An island or isle is any piece of sub-continental land that is surrounded by water. Very small islands such as emergent land features on atolls can be called islets, cays or keys. An island in a river or lake may be called an eyot , or holm...

 off the northeast coast of Sardinia
Sardinia
Sardinia is the second-largest island in the Mediterranean Sea . It is an autonomous region of Italy, and the nearest land masses are the French island of Corsica, the Italian Peninsula, Sicily, Tunisia and the Spanish Balearic Islands.The name Sardinia is from the pre-Roman noun *sard[],...

, Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

. The island is a limestone massif
Massif
In geology, a massif is a section of a planet's crust that is demarcated by faults or flexures. In the movement of the crust, a massif tends to retain its internal structure while being displaced as a whole...

 5 kilometres long and 1 kilometre wide, with steep cliffs except at its ends. Its highest point, Monte Cannone, is 565 metres above sea level. A cove and beach can be found at each end of the island, Spalmatore di Fuori at the northeast, and Spalmatore di Terra at the southwest. Currently, the island is inhabited by only a handful of families, and has a small cemetery
Cemetery
A cemetery is a place in which dead bodies and cremated remains are buried. The term "cemetery" implies that the land is specifically designated as a burying ground. Cemeteries in the Western world are where the final ceremonies of death are observed...

 and summer restaurant. The water around the island is a popular spot for scuba diving
Scuba diving
Scuba diving is a form of underwater diving in which a diver uses a scuba set to breathe underwater....

.

The nearest sizable town is Olbia
Olbia
Olbia is a town and comune of 56,231 inhabitants in northeastern Sardinia , in the Gallura sub-region. Called Olbia in the Roman age, Civita in the Middle Ages and Terranova Pausania before the 1940s, Olbia was again the official name of the town after the period of Fascism.-Geography:It is the...

, and the small fishing village of Porto San Paolo is directly across a small strait. The islands of Molara and Molarotto are nearby.
Most of the population of the island was displaced in 1962 when a NATO radiogoniometric station was constructed on the eastern half of the island. The aerial
Antenna (radio)
An antenna is an electrical device which converts electric currents into radio waves, and vice versa. It is usually used with a radio transmitter or radio receiver...

s from the station can be seen from quite a distance, and that entire half of the island is restricted to military personnel.

Tavolara is also home of the VLF-transmitter ICV, which works on 20.27 kHz and 20.76 kHz and which is used for transmitting messages to submarines. It can also be received (but not decoded) by PCs with a coil antenna at the soundcard entrance and FFT-analysis software.

The island and the surrounding waters are part of the Tavolara and Punta Coda Cavallo Marine Preserve created in 1997. The environmental protections placed on the park have added restrictions to the use of the area for tourism
Tourism
Tourism is travel for recreational, leisure or business purposes. The World Tourism Organization defines tourists as people "traveling to and staying in places outside their usual environment for not more than one consecutive year for leisure, business and other purposes".Tourism has become a...

.

A natural column of rock on the island's coast resembles a human figure and is known as "the Stone Sentry" or "Pope's Rock." Other stone formations include "Ulysses' Bow" (a natural arch) and the "Grotta del Papa" (a cave accessible by sea and boasting Neolithic
Neolithic
The Neolithic Age, Era, or Period, or New Stone Age, was a period in the development of human technology, beginning about 9500 BC in some parts of the Middle East, and later in other parts of the world. It is traditionally considered as the last part of the Stone Age...

 cave paintings).

Flora and fauna

A rare species of thorny knapweed, Centaurea horrida, is endemic only to Tavolara and a few other fringe areas of northern Sardinia. In his Natural History of Sardinia (1774), Francesco Cetti
Francesco Cetti
Francesco Cetti was an Italian Jesuit priest, zoologist and mathematician.Cetti was born in Mannheim in Germany, but his parents were natives of Como. He was educated in Lombardy and at the Jesuit college at Monza. In 1765 he was sent to Sardinia to help improve the standard of education on the...

 reported huge rat
Rat
Rats are various medium-sized, long-tailed rodents of the superfamily Muroidea. "True rats" are members of the genus Rattus, the most important of which to humans are the black rat, Rattus rattus, and the brown rat, Rattus norvegicus...

s inhabiting Tavolara, but these were probably the now-extinct Sardinian pika
Sardinian Pika
The Sardinian Pika was a primitive lagomorph native to the Mediterranean islands of Sardinia and Corsica until its extinction around the year 1800...

. In the 18th century, Sardinian lore claimed the wild goats of Tavolara had gold teeth. The goat herds were moved to Sardinia when the NATO station was built and there are no longer any goats on the island. The critically endangered
Critically endangered
Version 2010.3 of the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species identified 3744 Critically Endangered species, subspecies and varieties, stocks and subpopulations.Critically Endangered by kingdom:*1993 Animalia*2 Fungi*1745 Plantae*4 Protista-References:...

 monk seal
Mediterranean Monk Seal
The Mediterranean monk seal is a pinniped belonging to the Phocidae family. At some 450-510 remaining individuals, it is believed to be the world's second-rarest pinniped , and one of the most endangered mammals in the world.It is present in parts of the Mediterranean Sea and the eastern Atlantic...

 had a breeding colony here until the 1960s. Once the home of a thriving lobster
Spiny lobster
Spiny lobsters, also known as langouste or rock lobsters, are a family of about 45 species of achelate crustaceans, in the Decapoda Reptantia...

 industry, Tavolara now attracts divers who come to view the coral
Coral
Corals are marine animals in class Anthozoa of phylum Cnidaria typically living in compact colonies of many identical individual "polyps". The group includes the important reef builders that inhabit tropical oceans and secrete calcium carbonate to form a hard skeleton.A coral "head" is a colony of...

, sponges, sea anemones, bottlenose dolphins, and even a few specimens of Pinna nobilis
Pinna (genus)
Pinna is a genus of pen shells. It is a cosmopolitan genus of bivalve molluscs characterized by elongated, wedge-shaped shells which most commonly stand point-first in the sea bottom in which they live, anchored by a net of byssus threads....

, the rare giant clam
Clam
The word "clam" can be applied to freshwater mussels, and other freshwater bivalves, as well as marine bivalves.In the United States, "clam" can be used in several different ways: one, as a general term covering all bivalve molluscs...

 whose byssus
Byssus
Byssus means both a silky filament by which certain molluscs attach themselves to hard surfaces, and a rare fabric, also called sea silk and its fibre source.-Word:...

 fibers were formerly used in the manufacture of sea silk
Sea silk
Sea silk is an extremely fine, rare and valuable fabric produced from the long silky filaments or byssus secreted by a gland in the foot of several bivalve molluscs by which they attach themselves to the sea bed....

 for royal garments.

History

The island was known in ancient times as Hermea. According to tradition, Pope St. Pontian
Pope Pontian
Pope Pontian or Pontianus was Pope from 21 July 230 to 29 September 235.A little more is known of Pontian than his predecessors, apparently from a lost papal chronicle that was available to the compiler of the Liberian Catalogue of bishops of Rome, made in the fourth century.During his pontificate...

 died on Tavolara following his abdication and exile in 235. It is probably identical to the island called Tolar, which was used by Arab ships in 848-849 as a base to attack nearby coasts.

Joachim Murat
Joachim Murat
Joachim-Napoléon Murat , Marshal of France and Grand Admiral or Admiral of France, 1st Prince Murat, was Grand Duke of Berg from 1806 to 1808 and then King of Naples from 1808 to 1815...

 visited Tavolara in 1815 during his attempt to regain the Kingdom of Naples
Kingdom of Naples
The Kingdom of Naples, comprising the southern part of the Italian peninsula, was the remainder of the old Kingdom of Sicily after secession of the island of Sicily as a result of the Sicilian Vespers rebellion of 1282. Known to contemporaries as the Kingdom of Sicily, it is dubbed Kingdom of...

. At that time the island was uninhabited.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, Tavolara was ruled by the Bertoleoni
Bertoleoni
Bertoleoni is the self-proclaimed ruling family of the self-styled "Kingdom of Tavolara" , which claimed to be "the smallest kingdom of the world"...

 family as the Kingdom of Tavolara
Kingdom of Tavolara
The Kingdom of Tavolara was a small independent state existing in the 19th and 20th centuries in Tavolara Island, off the northeast coast of Sardinia. Ruled by the Bertoleoni family, it was one of the smallest kingdoms in the world...

, one of the smallest kingdoms on the planet. It is now simply part of Italy, although it was never formally annexed.

In 1836, King Charles Albert of Sardinia
Charles Albert of Sardinia
Charles Albert was the King of Piedmont-Sardinia from 1831 to 1849. He succeeded his distant cousin Charles Felix, and his name is bound with the first Italian statute and the First War of Independence...

 visited the island and acknowledged Giuseppe Bertoleoni
Bertoleoni
Bertoleoni is the self-proclaimed ruling family of the self-styled "Kingdom of Tavolara" , which claimed to be "the smallest kingdom of the world"...

 as an independent sovereign
Sovereignty
Sovereignty is the quality of having supreme, independent authority over a geographic area, such as a territory. It can be found in a power to rule and make law that rests on a political fact for which no purely legal explanation can be provided...

 monarch
Monarch
A monarch is the person who heads a monarchy. This is a form of government in which a state or polity is ruled or controlled by an individual who typically inherits the throne by birth and occasionally rules for life or until abdication...

. When he died in the 1840s, his eldest son became King Paolo I
Bertoleoni
Bertoleoni is the self-proclaimed ruling family of the self-styled "Kingdom of Tavolara" , which claimed to be "the smallest kingdom of the world"...

.

After Italian unification, King Paolo actively sought recognition from Italy. During his reign, in 1868 the Italian government began operating a lighthouse on the northeast end of the island. Tavolara's sovereignty was reconfirmed in 1903, when Victor Emmanuel III of Italy signed a treaty of friendship with the nation.
After Paolo's death in 1886, he was succeeded by his son, Carlo I
Bertoleoni
Bertoleoni is the self-proclaimed ruling family of the self-styled "Kingdom of Tavolara" , which claimed to be "the smallest kingdom of the world"...

. In 1900, Queen Victoria sent the Royal Photographer to Tavolara in order to make an official portrait of the Tavolara Royal Family, and include it in her collection of royal portraits.

Carlo was succeeded upon his death in 1928 by his son King Paolo II
Bertoleoni
Bertoleoni is the self-proclaimed ruling family of the self-styled "Kingdom of Tavolara" , which claimed to be "the smallest kingdom of the world"...

. Paolo went abroad, however, and left Carlo's sister Mariangela
Bertoleoni
Bertoleoni is the self-proclaimed ruling family of the self-styled "Kingdom of Tavolara" , which claimed to be "the smallest kingdom of the world"...

 as regent in his absence. Queen Mariangela died in 1934, leaving the kingdom to Italy.

Her nephew Paolo II still claimed the kingdom, however, and ruled it until his death in 1962. That year marked the installation of the NATO station and the effective end of Tavolaran sovereignty.

The present King Tonino
Bertoleoni
Bertoleoni is the self-proclaimed ruling family of the self-styled "Kingdom of Tavolara" , which claimed to be "the smallest kingdom of the world"...

 of Tavolara is an Italian citizen named Tonino Bertoleoni, who runs "Da Tonino," a restaurant on the island. Politically, the interests of the island are represented in its external dealings by Prince Ernesto Geremia di Tavolara, of La Spezia
La Spezia
La Spezia , at the head of the Gulf of La Spezia in the Liguria region of northern Italy, is the capital city of the province of La Spezia. Located between Genoa and Pisa on the Ligurian Sea, it is one of the main Italian military and commercial harbours and hosts one of Italy's biggest military...

, Italy, who has written a history of the island.

The royal tomb of King Paolo I is in the graveyard on the island, surmounted by a crown.

VLF- Antenna

The VLF-antenna of Tavolara VLF transmitter is spun between a 133 metres tall mast
at 40°55′23"N 9°43′51.51"E on Spalmatore di Furi and 4 masts, which are situated on mountains southwards.
They are situated at 40°54′52.45"N 9°44′9.03"E, at 40°54′51.42"N 9°44′8.21"E, at 40°54′51.09"N 9°43′30.38"E and at 40°54′51.09"N 9°43′28.91"E
The both masts on the eastern mountain are 114 metres tall, the two others are smaller.
  • Picture: http://www.panoramio.com/photo/4045954
  • Height data: http://www.ead.eurocontrol.int/eadbasic/pamslight/L52YHILY3X3PW/EN/AIP/ENR/LI_ENR_5_4_en_2011-03-10.pdf, Page 99

In popular culture

  • Tavolara is the name given to a fictional island in the Philippines ruled by a cannibal king, in the 1902 Harvard comic opera "Queen Philippine."

  • The Tavolara military base appears in The Lovers by Morris West
    Morris West
    Morris Langlo West AO was an Australian novelist and playwright, best known for his novels The Devil's Advocate , The Shoes of the Fisherman , and The Clowns of God . His books were published in 27 languages and sold more than 60 million copies worldwide...

    , a suspense novel set during the Cold War.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK