Arcipelago Toscano
Seven islands strung between the mainland and Corsica — Elba's iron mountains, penal-colony Pianosa, forbidden Montecristo — inside Europe's largest marine park.
Legend says Venus's necklace broke over the Tyrrhenian and seven pearls fell: Elba, Giglio, Capraia, Montecristo, Pianosa, Gorgona, Giannutri. The national park, created in 1996 over all seven and vast tracts of the sea between them, likes to call itself Europe's largest marine park, and the claim is less interesting than the pattern it protects — seven islands with seven completely different fates, from mass-tourism Elba to Montecristo, an integral reserve of wild goats and holm oak where landing is rationed to a couple of thousand permit-holders a year and the waiting list runs long.
Elba carries the weight. Its western third is a granite dome, Monte Capanne, rising 1,019 metres straight from the sea; its eastern hills are red with iron, mined from the Etruscans until 1981 and still glittering with hematite around Rio Marina. In between, Portoferraio keeps the villas of Napoleon's ten-month kingdom of 1814–15, the best-documented exile in history and the source of the island's oddly imperial souvenir trade. The Grande Traversata Elbana walks the island end to end in three or four days, ridgeline all the way, with the whole archipelago laid out at either hand. Capraia, next west, is the volcanic one — a crater rim of red cliffs, a village, and macchia that smells of helichrysum.
The strangest conservation story is penal. Pianosa and Gorgona were prison islands — Pianosa held the maximum-security wing where the state confined Mafia bosses until 1998, Gorgona still runs as a working prison farm — and a century of enforced emptiness left them accidental sanctuaries: Pianosa's hares graze at your feet, its seagrass meadows are the healthiest in the archipelago, and both islands are visitable only in small guided quotas. Monk seals, exterminated here by the 1950s, have begun appearing again in the archipelago's waters — single animals hauling out in Capraia's coves, the Mediterranean's rarest mammal testing an old home.
What's worth knowing before you go
Ferries run Piombino–Elba hourly, Porto Santo Stefano–Giglio and (seasonally) Giannutri, Livorno–Capraia. Pianosa's daily quota is booked through operators on Elba; Gorgona's guided visits through the prison cooperative, well ahead. Elba is overrun in August — June and late September give warm sea and empty trails. The Monte Capanne cable basket from Marciana, an open two-person cage, is the quick way to the summit ridge.
The connoisseur's island is Capraia in September: the crossing from Livorno, a swim in Cala Rossa under the crater wall, anchovies and Capraia's own wine in the port before the boat back — the archipelago as it was before anyone counted visitors.