Luna (Etruria)

Luna, known today as Luni, was a Roman settlement founded in 177 BC in what is now the province of La Spezia in eastern Liguria, Italy, near the border with Tuscany. Sited on a plain crossed by the Magra River close to the Tyrrhenian Sea, it served as a military stronghold and grew into a major port exporting the white marble quarried nearby that Romans called Luna marble. Repeated raids, including by Saracens in 849 and Vikings in 860, along with malaria and the silting of its harbor, drove its decline, and by the 11th century its population had relocated to nearby Sarzana. Petrarch later described the ruined city as once famous and powerful and by then only a bare and useless name.