The City of Ithaca (named for the Greek island of Ithaca in Homer's Odyssey) sits on the southern shore of Cayuga Lake, in Central New York State and is famous for being the location for Cornell University and Ithaca College.

The City of Ithaca is the center of the Ithaca metropolitan area (which also contains the legally distinct Town of Ithaca and other towns and villages in Tompkins County) and the county seat of Tompkins County, New York. As of 2000, the city had a population of 29,287, and the metropolitan area had a population of 100,135. 2004 estimates puts the city population at 29,952, an increase of 2.3%. It is the North American seat of his Holiness Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama.