Springtime on Elba

In travel as in life, journeys should be as interesting as destinations. And my long, convoluted voyage to Elba – a plane, three trains and a ship – is never short on stimulation. That’s the thing with islands. They require commitment to reach, and make you see so much else on the way. Then when at last you find yourself on their private sea-girt world, nowhere else seems to matter.

As my plane comes in to land, the leaning tower of Pisa pokes its cheeky white diagonal over surrounding buildings to welcome me to Tuscany. It’s April, the very start of the visitor season, and I shall be among the first foreign guests of the year on Elba. A train carries me toward the port town of Piombino through a rolling Arcadian landscape dressed in bright spring greens and fizzing with pink blossom. Piombino arrives as an arresting tangle of steelworks and hellfire, with chimneys belching smoke over a landscape of gantries, pylons and rusting iron. It’s so extreme it’s beautiful.

I step from the tiny ferry-port station into dazzling sea-light and all the typical colours of ships –