Ithaca is small — 96 square kilometres, with a 2021 population of 2,862 people. It stretches 23 kilometres from north to south, never more than 6 kilometres wide. The island is essentially two hilly masses connected by a narrow isthmus at Aetos, just 600 metres across, which encloses the deep bay of Molos on the eastern side. At its southern end the harbour of Vathy, the island's capital, cuts into the hills — a port so sheltered that the water inside barely moves. The tallest peak, Nirito in the north, reaches 806 metres. The coastline runs for about 100 kilometres, mostly rock and small coves, with scattered bays including Afales to the northwest and Frikes and Kioni to the northeast.

The identification of modern Ithaca with Homer's Ithaca has never been entirely settled, and the debate has attracted serious scholars for centuries. Homer's text describes Ithaca as low-lying, but the island is mountainous. He places it 'farthest out to sea, towards the sunset,' yet Kefalonia lies further west. Wilhelm Dörpfeld, the nineteenth-century German archaeologist, argued that Lefkada was the real Homeric Ithaca and that the island now called Ithaca was Homer's Same. A more recent theory proposes that Paliki — the western peninsula of Kefalonia — was separated from the main island by a sea channel in Homeric times, closed later by earthquake-induced rockfalls. Despite these complications, classical and Roman sources universally identified the present island as Odysseus's home, and in 2010 Greek archaeologists discovered the remains of an 8th-century BC palace at Agios Athanasios that may, tentatively, support that identification.

People have been living on Ithaca since the 4th millennium BC. The Neolithic settlers left traces of buildings, walls, and roads. During the Mycenaean period the island may have served as the capital of the wider Cephalonian kingdom. Romans arrived in the 2nd century BC; the Byzantines held it thereafter; the Normans ruled in the 13th century. Then came the Tocco family, then the Venetians, then — briefly and unpleasantly — the Ottomans. The Venetian period brought the Galatis and Karavia families as dominant island clans, with the Karavias in particular conducting profitable maritime trade and piracy against the Ottomans from their fiefs on the island. French Revolutionary forces arrived in 1797. Russia and Turkey managed a joint occupation from 1798 to 1807. Napoleon's empire took another turn. The British finally settled matters in 1809, and Ithaca became part of the United States of the Ionian Islands under British protection until 1864, when it joined Greece along with the other Ionian islands under the Treaty of London.

Three archaeological sites on the island have drawn the most attention from those hunting Odysseus. The Polis Cave near Stavros in the north was identified by Heinrich Schliemann as the cave Odysseus visited on his return, and research by Sylvia Benton in the 1930s found objects consistent with ancient cult worship — though the site turns out to have served as a sacred space for millennia, dedicated to nymphs, with no clear connection to a specific Odyssean biography. The so-called School of Homer is the only site in the Lefkas–Kefalonia–Ithaca triangle where Linear B inscriptions may have been found, near what appear to be royal remains. And the 2010 palace discovery at Agios Athanasios added another thread to a tangled scholarly debate that shows no sign of resolution. Ithaca accumulates evidence without quite proving its case — which seems, somehow, appropriate.

Ithaca today has under 3,000 residents and a slow summer rhythm punctuated by the arrival of visitors who come specifically because of Homer. The capital, Vathy, sits at the head of its deep harbour, the buildings climbing the hillside in the characteristic Ionian style. The port town of Frikes in the north offers ferry connections to Fiskardo on Kefalonia just across the strait. The island's communities — Stavros, Kioni, Exogi, Perachori and others — are small enough that the landscape between them remains largely unchanged from what it would have looked like to anyone approaching from the sea three thousand years ago: rocky ridges, scrubby hillsides, and the same Ionian blue water that Odysseus spent ten years trying to cross his way back to.