Ischia is not a volcanic island in the past tense. Monte Epomeo, the 789-metre block at its centre, was pushed up out of the seabed by magma pressure roughly 33,000 years ago, and the fumaroles at Sant'Angelo still heat the sand hot enough to cook eggs. The island's coastline reads as a record of that pressure: green tuff cliffs, collapsed craters flooded by the sea, and the tiny volcanic dome of Castello Aragonese, joined to the main island only by a causeway built in 1441. The Greeks arrived first. Around 750 BC, colonists from Euboea founded Pithekoussai on the northern slope above what is now Lacco Ameno, making it the oldest Greek settlement in the western Mediterranean — older than Cumae, older than Naples itself. Archaeologists working the Valle di San Montano necropolis in 1953 recovered Nestor's Cup, a clay drinking vessel scratched with three lines of hexameter verse, among the earliest written Greek known. Trade, not conquest, brought them: Ischia sat on the iron route from Elba. What draws vessels around the island today is the same geology that drew the Greeks to its harbours. The port at Riva Destra occupies a flooded volcanic crater, opened to the sea in 1854 by order of Ferdinand II of Bourbon, who had a channel cut through the crater rim to convert a freshwater lake into a working harbour. That decision explains the port's almost perfectly circular shape, visible from any deck leaving the mouth. An ischia boat tour private charter departs from this rim and traces roughly 34 kilometres of shoreline. The circuit passes landmarks that reward being seen from the water rather than the road. Punta Caruso, the Sorgeto thermal spring where volcanic water meets the sea at bathing temperature, the sea arch below Sant'Angelo, and the grottoes of Cavascura are all approached more directly by hull than by path. Beyond Ischia lies Procida, 3.5 kilometres northeast, whose harbour at Marina Corricella was built in tiers of ochre and rose fishermen's houses in the seventeenth century. Private charters have become the preferred form of ischia boat tour private access to that coast, precisely because the itinerary is negotiable with the skipper rather than fixed by a timetable. The Gulf of Naples archipelago has been navigated this way for close to three millennia.