Ithaca

Traditional · identified with modern Ithaki

The goal of the ten years’ wandering: a harsh little island “good for goats,” loved past every offer of immortality. Identified since antiquity with the Ionian island still bearing the name (a modern minority argues for Kefalonia’s Paliki peninsula), it holds the poem’s whole last half — the swineherd’s hut, the hall of suitors, the olive-tree bed, and Laertes’ orchard where father and son count the trees.