As we sweep into Portoferraio, Elba’s striking capital, guarded by such imposing fortresses that Admiral Lord Nelson branded this the safest harbour in the world, I can’t help thinking that I’d rather like to be exiled here.
Around the horseshoe-shaped bay sit rows of handsome pastel-hued merchant houses, lined up like soldiers standing to attention alongside hulking stone walls built to defend the city by its Italian founders, the all-powerful Medici family of Florence.
But this pocket-sized Mediterranean isle, just off the coast of Tuscany, is arguably most famous as the place where Napoleon Bonaparte was banished in disgrace in 1814.
His exile lasted just 10 months after the military mastermind gave his British overseers the slip, escaping on a tall ship to a hero’s welcome in Paris, where he temporarily
