The island of Elba
A hundred and forty-seven kilometres of coast and about twenty campsites.
Elba is the third largest Italian island after Sicily and Sardinia, and the largest of the Tuscan archipelago. It is twenty-seven kilometres long and eighteen wide at its widest, but its coast measures a hundred and forty-seven kilometres because it is all inlets: the result is more than eighty different beaches in a small space.
The beaches change from one side to the other: dark sand at Marina di Campo and the Biodola, white shingle at Le Ghiaie and Capo Bianco, red stones at Cavoli and Fetovaia where the granite is iron-bearing. The island was a mining centre for two thousand seven hundred years, and the iron mines at Rio can be visited.
The towns
Portoferraio is the main port, with the Medici citadel and the two villas in which Napoleon spent the ten months of his exile, from May 1814 to February 1815. Marciana Marina and Capoliveri are seaside towns, Marciana Alta stands at four hundred metres below Monte Capanne, which the cable car reaches in twenty minutes.
There are about twenty campsites, nearly all on the western and southern coasts, and in August they are full. The ferry from Piombino to Portoferraio takes an hour and there are many sailings a day, but with a motorhome in high season it must be booked weeks ahead.