The Lady and the Legend

Taras, Taranto, and an Ancient Rider Still Moving

There are discoveries that feel less like finding something new than pulling something long submerged from the sea. At first there is only a glimmer beneath the surface. Then another. You reach down, follow what you can see, and suddenly something comes free from the sand that has been waiting there far longer than you knew to look for it. It arrives wet and shining in your hands, familiar in some inexplicable way despite having been hidden from view.

This story began for me with a dolphin.

For years, a woman riding a dolphin has been an emblem of my work. I made her deliberately from an ancient image associated with Taranto, my forefathers’ surname: the famous youth riding a dolphin who appeared again and again on the silver coins of ancient Taras. I made the rider female because I am female. Beyond that, I was taking an image that had already traveled for more than two thousand years and asking it to travel a little farther. I could hardly have known how much was coming with it.

Taras + Falanto = Taranto

On the coast of what is now Puglia, where the heel of Italy reaches into the Mediterranean world, stood the ancient Greek city of Taras, modern Taranto. Its geography seems almost designed for legend. Water surrounds and penetrates the city, with the Mar Grande opening toward the wider sea and the protected Mar Piccolo tucked behind it. For thousands of years, people there have lived by looking outward: toward ships, trade, fishing grounds, invaders, travelers and whatever might next appear upon the horizon.

The ancient story reaches still farther outward, into mythology. Taras was said to be the son of Poseidon, god of the sea, and the nymph Satyria. In the traditions surrounding the city, Taras is carried or rescued by a dolphin sent by his divine father, arriving upon the coast that would bear his name. It is a wonderfully Mediterranean image: the sea not as an empty distance between places, but as a living realm through which gods, people, animals, stories and civilizations move.

Then another founder comes sailing into the story. Toward the end of the eighth century BCE, Greek colonists arrived from Sparta, traditionally associated with the Partheniae and their leader Phalanthus, or Falanto in Italian. Falanto became the oikistēs, the colonial founder of Taras, and his own legendary history became entwined with the dolphin. Ancient traditions also tell of Falanto being saved after disaster at sea and carried safely by a dolphin.

Two riders therefore emerge from the waters surrounding the origins of the same city: Taras, the divine son whose name belongs to the place, and Falanto, the Spartan founder who crosses the sea to build there. Over centuries their histories accumulated, overlapped and survived in literature, civic memory and art. The question of precisely whom every ancient dolphin rider represents has consequently occupied historians and numismatists for generations, but the ambiguity itself tells us something important. The dolphin had grown larger than the biography of either man. It belonged to the identity of Taras.

Ancient tradition even preserved a wonderfully concise way of holding both founders within the same story: Taras fecit, auxit Phalantus, roughly, “Taras made it; Phalanthus enlarged it.” The phrase inspired in me a much less scholarly but considerably more delightful equation: Taras + Falanto = Taranto.

It is not an etymology, of course. Greek Taras passed into Latin as Tarentum and eventually became Italian Taranto. My little equation belongs instead to the realm of story, where the two founders seem to meet inside the modern city: Taras gives it his name and ancient divine ancestry; Falanto arrives across the sea with the Spartans and gives the Greek colony its historical foundation. Myth and migration meet on the shore, with a dolphin swimming through both stories.

That image might easily have disappeared with the world that created it. Instead, the people of Taras did something lasting. They made it money.

The Rider in Silver

Ancient coins are among the smallest great storytellers of civilization. A temple remains where it was built, if it survives at all. A monument may dominate a square for centuries. A coin behaves differently. It leaves.

The silver coinage of Taras repeatedly carried the image of a youthful figure riding upon a dolphin. Other Tarentine imagery appeared alongside it, particularly the celebrated horsemen associated with the city’s equestrian, athletic and military culture, but the dolphin rider became extraordinarily persistent. Dies changed, artists changed, political circumstances changed, and still the rider returned.

Imagine those coins when they were new, before museum cases and archaeological catalogues, when the silver still flashed sharply from the die. One passes from a merchant to a sailor, another pays a soldier, another disappears into a purse and travels beyond the city. Some are hoarded. Some are lost. Some cross seas. Some vanish underground for centuries until another pair of hands brings them back into daylight.

Long before an image could circle the world electronically, Taras sent its rider outward in silver. This is one of the things I find so moving about ancient objects. They collapse distances we otherwise measure in millennia. A coin is small enough to disappear in a closed hand, yet within it can survive a city’s economy, mythology, artistry and idea of itself. Someone designed that dolphin. Someone cut the die. Someone struck the metal. Someone received the finished coin in payment without the slightest idea that people thousands of years later would still be studying the little rider on its surface. Civilizations leave enormous ruins, but sometimes their most persistent ghosts fit in the palm of a hand.

History Lives

For me, the story first became personal through a name. Taranto was my father’s surname, and his father’s, and his – on and on into the past.

My paternal family came through the Aeolian Islands, those volcanic fragments scattered above Sicily where land seems almost temporary beside the permanence of the sea. My ancestors lived in a world of islands and boats, departures and returns. Generations of people there learned the horizon intimately because the horizon determined what could arrive, what could leave and what lay beyond the limits of the island.

The ancient name Taras traveled through Greek and Latin into modern Italian Taranto, and Taranto in turn became a surname carried by families far from the ancient city itself. Somewhere along that long human road, it became my family’s name.

That alone was enough to draw me toward the ancient dolphin rider. I did not need to reproduce him exactly. I wanted to enter the image.

So the rider became a woman.

The reason was wonderfully simple: I am a woman. The figure represented me. I kept the dolphin, the movement and the ancient cadence of rider and animal, but placed myself where the young male figure had been. The result was not an archaeological reconstruction of Taras or Falanto. It was a conversation with them across an impossible distance of time.

Only later did I begin to appreciate how perfectly suited the old composition was to change. The woman does not need to become an ancient hero in order to ride a dolphin. She can acknowledge the image, inherit its movement and continue onward as herself. That seems to me one of the great pleasures of living culture. We preserve the past not only by placing it behind glass, but also by allowing it to speak to people who were never part of the world that first created it. Ancient symbols do not have to remain imprisoned in antiquity to be respected. They can continue living. And my dolphin was not finished bringing things to the surface.

A Dolphin in a Tree

There is another current in this story, and astonishingly, it approaches from the other side of my family.

Rooted in my mother’s family tree is the surname of Dolphin.

Even writing the name now gives me a little thrill. I had already taken the ancient dolphin rider associated with my paternal name, Taranto, and made the figure my own. Yet from my mother’s side of the family came Dolphin itself, carried as a surname by Irish ancestors, islanders.

Recently I began following this line farther backward through genealogical records and DNA, and the search has begun drawing me toward County Galway, where the Dolphin name has a long and fascinating history. There are old Dolphin families in the records of Galway, particularly in the eastern part of the county, and the investigation continues. It is exactly the sort of historical pursuit I love: one name leads to another, one record opens a door into another century, and suddenly a place that had been merely a dot on the map begins filling with people. Before I know it, I’m face to face with the records of Mary Dolphin, my ancestress.

On my father’s side is Taranto, the modern name of the ancient city whose people sent a dolphin rider traveling across the Mediterranean on silver. On my mother’s side is Dolphin, carried over the Atlantic. Somewhere downstream from both of them, before I understood the breadth of either story, I had already drawn myself riding the dolphin.

There are moments when life seems to acquire another dimension simply because we have learned where to look. Something that had appeared singular reveals roots beneath it. Names begin speaking to one another across generations. Places separated by seas suddenly occupy the same page. We look backward and discover that our own lives contain fragments of journeys begun long before our birth. While I cannot map every current that brought these histories together, I am much more interested in the wonder of discovering that they are there.

In the Lemon Grove

This was not the first time a name had entered my creative life in circumstances that seemed determined to make itself memorable.

Years ago, I was standing beneath a lemon tree in a beautiful garden in Sicily. I needed a name for work that was taking shape, and although naming things is something I ordinarily enjoy enormously, this particular name had eluded me. So I said a small prayer. I thanked God for everything I had been given and said that I needed just one more thing: a name.

Afterwards, I picked up my phone. Maybe it was out of habit or maybe out of instinct. But what I saw answered my prayer.

The browser had been opened. The keyboard had changed to Spanish, and an internet search had been made for a word I had never seen before:

iñi.

Three letters, two dots and a tilde. I stared at it.

The first search results I encountered referenced Ini, a surname of pharaohs in ancient Egypt. A name. A name of kings. The written form of iñi itself had already caught me. The two dots over the is and the tilde over the ñ had a visual cadence that seemed to belong beside the woman riding the dolphin. The marks floated above the letters like water and spray. Dot, wave, dot. The name seemed almost to carry its own tiny sea.

I began using iñi intentionally in tandem with the dolphin emblem. The word and image belonged together visually, and before long something happened that I had not particularly planned: within about six months, people were calling me iñi.

I have no need to embellish this story, and equally little reason to explain it away. This is simply what happened. I stood beneath a lemon tree in Sicily and prayed for a name; afterward, I looked at my phone and found one there. What caused that remarkable sequence of events belongs to whatever larger explanation one brings to such things. I can only tell the story as I experienced it.

What mattered next was that I accepted the name. I worked with it, drew it below the dolphin, watched its punctuation become waves and eventually answered to it. Something I had never seen before that afternoon in Sicily entered my creative vocabulary and stayed there.

Perhaps experiences like this are why I have learned to leave a little space around names. We tend to imagine naming as an exercise in authority: we invent a word, define what it means, attach it to something and proceed. My own experience has been more adventurous. Some names are inherited. Some are encountered. Some are made. Some wait in history until we go looking for them. And sometimes an old name resurfaces precisely when a new one is needed.

Taras Returns

In 2026, I found myself needing an umbrella company capable of housing my various ventures while leaving plenty of room for ventures still to come. I did what I always do when naming something: I went exploring. There were winds and seas, ancient words and invented ones, names that sounded beautiful for an afternoon and others that survived several days. I wanted something short enough to remember, large enough to grow into, comfortable in both Italy and the United States, and capable of carrying businesses that might not resemble one another at all. Eventually, after wandering through a considerable ocean of possibilities, I found myself back where the story had begun.

Taras.

By then, the name looked different to me. It was no longer simply the ancient predecessor of Taranto. It carried the Ionian city and its dolphin rider, Poseidon and Satyria, Falanto and the Spartans, silver coins crossing the Mediterranean, my paternal surname, the Aeolian Islands and the woman I had placed upon the dolphin years earlier. Somewhere across the water was the island of Ireland and my ancestors the Dolphins, whose family history I had only begun to recover. Sicily was there too, with a lemon tree and another name that had arrived in its own extraordinary fashion.

There was substance beneath the name, layer after layer of it, and yet Taras remained wonderfully light. Five letters. Two syllables. Ancient without being cumbersome, open enough to hold things that did not yet exist. I reserved the name TARAS LLC, and in the months ahead it will become the holding company for my ventures.

I particularly love that word, ventures. Its modern business meaning is perfectly useful, but there is still adventure hiding inside it. A venture is something undertaken without complete knowledge of how it will end. It requires movement. It contains possibility and risk, curiosity and departure. A creative venture begins with something imagined but not yet made and proceeds toward a place that becomes visible only by moving toward it.

That seems perfetto.

Islands on the Horizon

Following this story backward has not made me want to remain in the past. Quite the opposite. Every discovery seems to put more wind in the sails.

Behind me now is an extraordinary landscape. There is ancient Taras facing the Ionian Sea, its people striking their rider into shining silver. There are the stories of Taras and Falanto, two founders arriving through different kinds of memory. There are my paternal ancestors in the Aeolian Islands carrying the name Taranto through their own lives, and Irish ancestors on another island carrying the surname of Dolphin – a surname I could hardly have invented more perfectly. There is Sicily, the lemon tree, the prayer and the strange little word iñi appearing on a screen. There is a woman who climbed onto an ancient dolphin because she recognized the rider’s place as somewhere she could go.

These discoveries do not feel like weights. They feel like provisions for the journey.

Our ancestors crossed oceans with astonishingly little compared with what we consider necessary today. Some left with their families, a few possessions, perhaps an address folded into a pocket and whatever money could be gathered. They stepped aboard ships without satellite maps, instant communication or any certainty that the places they were leaving would ever be seen again. They carried what could be carried: clothes, names, recipes, prayers, stories, skills, habits, hopes, children. Much of what survived those journeys did so not because anyone had decided it was historically important, but because families kept carrying it.

Generations later, we inherit pieces whose journeys we may only partly understand. A surname survives after its original geography has been forgotten. A story loses a detail but keeps a name. A symbol sleeps beneath the waves until someone sees a glint and reaches for it.

That is what this investigation has begun to feel like to me: sunken treasure coming back into the light. Not treasure because it can be owned or appraised, but because recovering it enlarges the world. Each piece tells us that the present is deeper than it appears, that underneath an ordinary name or familiar image may lie migrations, civilizations, acts of courage, improbable meetings and entire seas crossed by people whose choices eventually made our own lives possible.

And after all that looking backward, I find myself increasingly interested in the view ahead. There are ventures already underway and others still without names. There are ideas only beginning to show their outlines. There are places where the work may travel, people I have not met, collaborations not yet imagined and things that will exist one day because someone decided to make them. From a sufficient distance they are only shapes against the light, islands on the horizon. We will learn what they contain by going there.

Perhaps that is why the ancient dolphin rider feels more alive to me now than when I first borrowed his place. He is not enthroned. He is not standing still. He is moving over water toward something beyond the edge of the coin, into a future that has become our present.

My rider is moving too. She has the ancient city behind her and open water ahead. The dolphin rises beneath her, the wind catches her hair, and whatever histories have gathered in her wake have not slowed her down. They have given her more to carry forward.

More than two thousand years ago, the people of Taras placed a rider upon a dolphin and sent him traveling into the world on silver. Somewhere along the way, across languages and islands and generations, he found me. And my dolphin.

The horizon is wide open.

We have places to go.