[2] Populonia is especially noteworthy for its Etruscan remains, including one of the main necropolis in Italy, discovered by Isidoro Falchi.

Over the thousand years of its life it came to cover the entire southern shore of the bay with slag, piling it over abandoned residences and cemeteries, until it lost its utility as a metals manufacturer.

The port has long since been replaced by the city of Piombino on the southern slopes of Monte Massoncello, which is the departure point of maritime traffic leading to Elba and elsewhere.

The heights feature a massive fortress built in the 15th century by the Appiani lords of Piombino, with stones taken from Etruscan remains.

Considerable remains of its town walls, of large irregular, roughly rectangular blocks (the form follows the natural spalling of the local schistose sandstone), still enclose a circuit of about 2.5 km (1.6 mi).

In one, a large circular tomb, were found three sepulchral couches in stone, carved in imitation of wood, and a fine statuette in bronze of Ajax committing suicide.

The iron mines of Elba, and the tin and copper of the mainland, were owned and smelted by the people of Populonia; hot springs too lay some 10 km to the east (Aquae Populaniae) on the coastal high road —Via Aurelia.

According to Virgil, building on a tradition of an ancient alliance with Rome, the town sent a contingent to the help of Aeneas; in historical times it furnished Scipio the Elder with iron in 205 BC.

[9] The earliest evidence of Etruscans at Fufluna is from two necropoleis containing material of the Villanovan culture, which was Iron Age and began about 900 BC.

The Poggio del Molino (or Mulino, "the mill") north of Baratti must be associated with Fufluna because of a geographical barrier, not there now, once termed Lake Rimigliano.

In Etruscan times it was a lagoon fringed by a barrier island (the current beach area) extending from San Vincenzo in the north southward to the foot of Poggio del Molino, where it was broken by an egress point (today the mouth of an irrigation channel).

The lagoon and its swamps would have created conditions conducive to malaria, meaning that free Etruscans who could afford it would have preferred to live on the heights.

A number of stories about the foundation of Populonia promulgated by the classical authors concerning these events removed from their times by at least several hundred years, the better part of it prehistoric, have been found to have no basis in any known archaeological fact.

In geology, the "Tuscan metallogenic province" derived from volcanic intrusions into southern Etruria due to extension of the crust there (which also created a karst topography in western Italy) from the late Miocene to the Pleistocene.

[17] This process emplaced iron oxide deposits on Elba, pyrite in southern Tuscany and various kinds of skarn including copper-bearing in the Colline Metallifere, called Etruria Mineraria in the Middle Ages.

Copper slag remains on the beach, which has been dated to the 9th and 8th centuries BC by radiocarbon methods;[21] in other words, the city may have been founded to process ore.

In 2024, excavations brought to light the remains of an aristocratic domus destroyed by a fire around 50 BC, in the Archaeological Park of Baratti and Populonia, which tell us the story of Ledeltius, a slave who managed to regain his freedom.