Asinara

Asinara owes its wilderness to a cruel accident of administration. In 1885 the state expelled the island's shepherds and fishing families to build a quarantine station and a penal colony, and for the next 112 years the fifty-two square kilometres off Sardinia's north-western tip were closed to the world: Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war died here by the thousand in 1915–16 (their ossuary chapel still stands above Campo Perdu), and from the 1970s the bunker at Fornelli held the state's most dangerous men — Red Brigades chiefs, then the Corleonesi bosses. In the summer of 1985, judges Falcone and Borsellino were hidden on the island with their families to write the Maxi Trial indictment in safety. When the prison closed in 1997, a century of enforced emptiness was signed over almost intact as a national park.

What the closure preserved is startling. The macchia runs unfenced from coast to coast, mouflon and boar move through it, and the island's mascot — a population of small white albino donkeys, likely descendants of abandoned stock — grazes the old prison fields as if employed to embody the place's strangeness. The coves alternate schist and granite, from the turquoise shallows opposite Stintino to Cala Sant'Andrea's no-entry reserve; the surrounding sea is a marine protected area where grouper and bream have regrown to sizes the mainland forgot. Scattered down the one 25-kilometre road stand the relics: Fornelli's high-security block, bleak and visitable; Cala Reale's Savoyard quarantine complex; and Cala d'Oliva, a whitewashed hamlet that was the warders' village.

There are no private cars and no hotels. You land at Fornelli or Cala Reale, and you move by bicycle, rented e-bike, the guided 4x4s, or on foot — and the emptiness is the exhibit: an island the size of a city with nobody in it, where the loudest event of the afternoon is a donkey's opinion.

What's worth knowing before you go

Boats run from Stintino to Fornelli (fifteen minutes) and from Porto Torres to Cala Reale, more often in summer. There is one bar-restaurant at Cala d'Oliva and little else — carry water, and respect the zoning: several coves are look-don't-swim reserves. The island is shadeless and the northwest wind is serious; spring and early autumn are the kind months. Cycling the full road out-and-back is a real day's work with climbs.

The connoisseur's option is the ostello in the old warders' quarters at Cala d'Oliva: when the last boat leaves at five, the island reverts to the donkeys, the prison ruins go gold, and dawn on the east road — sea on both sides, no engine within earshot — is as alone as the Mediterranean gets.