Cateraggio, where visitors and academics are quartered. Still south of there was the Etruscan necropolis, in today's Casabianda. Aléria takes its name from the Roman town placed there after the defeat of the Etruscans. The entire district, however, is wider still, following the Corsican custom of including some mountains and some beaches in every district. It incorporates the agricultural lands of Teppe Rosse (to the west), the entire Étang de Diane and the Plage de Padulone east of Cateraggio, a former barrier beach. Since 1975 a series of laws have created the Casabianda-Aléria Nature Preserve, between the mouth of the Tavignanu and the Étang d'Urbinu, which is to the south. The reserve to the south was initiated from the grounds of the former penitentiary of Casabianda in 1951. It was instituted in 1880 in a then pestilential area which it was hoped the prisoners could farm. It contained 1800 ha and 214 plots. Due to a high death rate from malaria, the agricultural experiment failed. History Pre-Roman According to Herodotus twenty years before the abandonment of Phocaea in Ionia, that is, in 566 BC, Phocaeans colonizing the western Mediterranean founded a city, , on the island of Cyrnus (Corsica). Diodorus Siculus says that the city was named Calaris, possibly a corruption of . The historical circumstances of Calaris leave no doubt that it was Aleria. Diodorus says that Aleria had a "beautiful large harbor, called Syracusium," that Calaris and another city, Nicaea, were on it, and that Nicaea had been built by the Etruscans. Syracusium can only be the Étang de Diane, a lake exiting to the Tyrrhenian Sea. As Aleria and Nicaea were trade rivals it seems unlikely that the Etruscans would have allowed the Phocaeans, who were ancient Greeks, access to Étang de Diane. Nicaea is generally identified with the La Marana district further north, where the Romans later built a city, Mariana, on the Étang de Biguglia, a better harbor. Diodorus says that the cities of Corsica were subject to the Phocaeans and that the latter took slaves, resin, wax and honey from them. was then an emporium. Of the natives whom the Phocaeans subjugated Diodorus says only that they were "barbarians, whose language is very strange and difficult to understand" and that they numbered more than 30,000. At home Phocaea was the first city of Ionia to come under siege by the army of Cyrus, who