ITALY
Exquisite exile in Elba
It’s 200 years since Napoleon escaped his exile on Elba, but, today, the small island off the coast of Tuscany is a well-kept second-home secret escape from the demands of modern living, reports Liz Robertson
T
HERE must be plenty of worse places to be exiled to than the lovely island of Elba in the Tuscan archi-
pelago. A small isle, packed with mountains, hairpin roads along ver- tiginous cliffs and chestnut forests, it offers more than 150 beaches, from tiny coves of crystal-clear water to the wide sweep of sugar-sand at Cavoli. But, back in 1815, the banished Napo- leon Bonaparte escaped from his Mediterranean ‘idyll’ after only 10
months of governing the 12,000 inhabitants of Elba. He’d tired of organising the economy,
repairing the roads and even munch- ing cherries with his mistress, so he marched back to France and, ulti- mately, the Battle of Waterloo, whose bicentenary we will be celebrating next month. The rest as they say is history, but although Napoleon’s legacy is hard to escape on the island— there are logos, books and souvenirs galore—there’s so much more to Elba,
Moorings such as that at Porto Azzurro make Elba a popular destination for yachties
a rather unsung summer playground enjoyed by its Milanese and German- speaking holiday-home owners that is being discovered by a wider audience. The largest island off the Tuscan
coast, Elba resembles Corsica (31 miles west across the Tyrrhenian Sea) for its dramatic cragginess— Napoleon’s mother called it ‘beauti- ful, charming, elegant and frighten- ingly powerful’—as well as the west coast of Sardinia for its numerous ‘secret’ inlets. Approached by an hour-long ferry ride from Piombino on the Tuscan mainland, or via limited air connections to its little airport on the south coast, it’s not reached easily enough to appeal to the masses. For those seeking a complete escape, however, it’s a well-kept secret. ‘Elba will never be like Capri or
Sardinia’s Costa Smeralda and it’s much safer than Sicily,’ says Daniela Coni of Sotheby’s International Realty, who’s lived on Elba for many years. ‘People don’t come here for glitz— they just want to relax in the beauti- ful natural surroundings. There is no crime—we don’t worry about locking doors all the time.’ Part of the Tuscan national park,
FOR SALE €2.6m
Fetovaia Wonderful little hideaway in a beautiful area of protected parkland with terraced gardens running down to the water’s edge of a beautiful bay. This one-bedroom, 45sq m (485sq ft)
property offers a summer kitchen. Knight Frank (020–7629 1058;
www.knightfrank.com) 26 Country Life International, Summer 2015
great chunks of the island are pro- tected forest or garrigue that will never be built on (you won’t find any Ibiza–esque new-build villas on these
www.countrylife.co.uk/international
Francesco Iacobelli/JAI/Corbis Images
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