In times of viruses, the island of Montecristo is "Covid free" by itself. In these 10 square kilometers of granite rock (of volcanic origin) in the middle of the Tyrrhenian Sea, officially in the Tuscan archipelago but historically no man's land halfway between Italy and Corsica, there is in fact no need for vaccines or quarantines. On the island told by Alexandre Dumas, who in reality according to the official versions has only seen it from afar, remaining fatally fascinated by it, nobody lives and even the few animals present survive in a habitat not infested by man but still inhospitable even for They. The famous vipers feed only on lizards and are underweight according to experts. Birds of prey, including the imperious red kite, fly over the island in the vain hope of spotting a few rats, but there have been none here for some time. The island mistresses are approx 200 wild goats, whose genetic characteristics testify to a millenary biodiversity (they are of a rare species, present only in Asia Minor and in some Aegean islands), while in the sea you can easily spot monk seals and blue whales.
To protect these forms of life, which are the continuous object of study, Montecristo is today a biogenetic nature reserve: protected by State property since 1971, administratively it is part of the nearby (over 1 hour of navigation by ferry) island of Elba and is one of the 149 areas managed by the Carabinieri Command for the protection of biodiversity and parks. The only humans present on the island are therefore a handful of carabinieri who guard the island in two-week shifts, sometimes accompanied by groups of researchers who also benefit from European funds for such a noble mission, and by a maximum of 2.000 visitors l year, who can reach Montecristo strictly through guided tours organized by the Tuscan Archipelago National Park, in groups of up to 70-80 people at a time. You go and come back in the day: apart from the lodgings for the service personnel, there is nothing else on the island of the imaginary Count of Dumas. Only electricity, a small pier in the only beach (beautiful but small) of the whole island and they don't even take cell phones.
And it is also for this, as well as for his fraught and inaccessible conformation, that it was not possible and conceivable to exploit this little gem for tourist activities. Its charm and mystery have remained intact since the dawn of time. “It is the most protected island in the whole Mediterranean”, swear by the guides of the National Park. But that wasn't always the case in the past. The history of Monte Cristo is in fact imbued with true events and legends, bloody events, pirate raids, religious events and literary narratives, so much so that it conveys the image of a "cursed" place. Although it is not uncommon in the world to find pristine islands of which little is known (think of Easter Island), due to its relative proximity to the mainland, Montecristo represents a unicum: in the era in which any place is accessible, habitable, covered via WiFi, the island just two and a half hours by ferry from Piombino is still shrouded in mystery. Little is known about this wild and silent place, and that little may not be true.
According to legend, the first to give her a name were the Greeks, who called it “Ocrasia”. The current name was probably given by St. Mamilian, one of the first and of the few men to have actually inhabited it. In the 600th century, having fled from Palermo following the persecutions of Genserico, King of the Vandals, he was taken prisoner and sold as a slave. Having managed to escape in an adventurous way, after fleeing to Sardinia he took refuge on the island, then inhabited by a dragon, which he himself allegedly defeated. San Mamiliano then lived in extreme solitude and meditation in a cave (known today as the "Grotta del Santo"), renaming the island to "Mons Christi" (precisely Monte di Cristo). The only work that bears witness to the passage of man on the island is the Abbey of San Mamiliano, which however was dedicated to him after his death: built in the 645s, it was inhabited for centuries by Benedictine monks, to whom the introduction of goats is attributed, one of the few animals suitable for living on the very steep sides of this XNUMX-metre mountain emerging from the sea, barely passable by equipped hikers.
Even the viper, one of the few species that can be seen, could have been introduced by the monks, who, as known, possessed considerable pharmaceutical skills, for which they probably knew how to use the very poisonous reptile serum even in the right doses (still today, for example, the viper serum is a cosmetic product useful for counteracting skin aging, but this was probably not what the monks used it for…). However, the settlements were always sporadic and with a few people at a time, who reached the island for short periods, even as pilgrimage destination to celebrate the memory of the saint. It cannot be excluded that other farm animals had been introduced to ensure the livelihood of the monks, but there has been no trace of them for some time. Few animals are able to survive on this rock with rather arid characteristics, where there is not even an abundance of water and the vegetation itself is not that typical of the Mediterranean maquis. There are a few centuries-old holm oaks, there is no shortage of them shrubs and herbs: the presence of rosemary is very dense, which gives off a particular and uncatalogable scent.
The quiet routine of Monte Cristo, so to speak, was abruptly interrupted in 1553: from that date, it could be the set of a film, like Pirates of the Caribbean, or why not Mediterranean by Gabriele Salvatores (between the two World Wars it was also a military garrison), but also of novels such as Stevenson's Treasure Island or the same Count of Montecristo, which is ideally set right here. The famous book by the French writer Alexandre Dumas is partially inspired by the events of 1553: the island was plundered by the legendary Ottoman pirate Dragut, at the time in the pay of the French, probably in search of a treasure of which, however, there is no certainty. From that moment Montecristo began to become a no man's land, a place of raids by bandits and brigands, and occasionally by fishermen. begins its "cursed" phase, also testified by one of the corners of the island, Point of the Children, which refers to a particularly bloody event. Around the middle of the 800th century, a Sardinian tartana traveling from La Spezia to Livorno was attacked by brigands, who took two children hostage and fled towards the south. Once they arrived near Montecristo, they slaughtered the two children and threw them into the sea.
Soon after, Montecristo was bought by what could be called its "real" Count: a wealthy Englishman, George Watson Taylor, he was the first person to seriously start the project of going to live on the island, in fact uninhabited for centuries. Those were the years of Romanticism, which as an ideal also represented interest in unspoiled nature, a spirit of adventure, a rush of heroism. Taylor transformed the Cala Maestra landing place by introducing terraces and planting numerous tree species, including exotic ones. In this context, he also carried out the construction of the first building since the times of the Abbey of San Mamiliano (of which only the main structure and some ruins remain), later called Villa Reale and still today the seat of the garrison of the carabinieri. The spirit of the project is somewhat in the colonial manner of the English, represented a few decades later by the works and activities of Gerald Durrell in Corfu, which gave rise – to give an idea, if one has the opportunity to see it – to the TV series The Durrell's.
After a short experience like prison colony (for which it would actually lend itself, in conditions of prison at the same time golden and hard ...), we arrive at the end of the nineteenth century and the first official Italian tenant of Montecristo: already owned by the Italian State, which in the meantime had unified , the island was rented, as a hunting reserve, to the nobleman Carlo Ginori Smooth, made it a sort of exclusive club frequented by a very few elected members of high society, including Renato Fucini, Giacomo Puccini and Vittorio Emanuele III himself, about to ascend the throne. The prince was so fascinated by the environment, and by the fauna (then probably more populous than now, and also the thicker vegetation), that he wanted to spend his honeymoon here with his wife Elena of Montenegro. It got to the point that in 1899 Ginori ceded his rights on the island to the King, with these words: «If I am, as you have called me, the true Count of Monte Cristo, you are its sovereign; mine is a temporary possession, yours is a sovereign domain. I surrender my rights».
During the Great Wars, one was installed in Monte Cristo Italian-German military post. In 1948, during a military exercise, a British bomber crashed on the island killing all seven occupants. In 1949 an attempt was made to allocate Montecristo to fishing activity: the Directorate General of State Property gave the island in concession to a consortium of cooperatives of fishermen and similar, the Consorpesca, but the experiment aborted shortly after. Still almost intact, in the years of the economic boom Montecristo risked being stripped like tourist destination, making it an exclusive resort but of questionable taste, above all due to the nature of the place, which lends itself little to the sudden exploitation that we are used to seeing today in Italy and around the world. In 1970 the Roman company Oglasa created the Montecristo Sporting Club for clients of high social status, exploiting winter hunting and summer tourism. In that case it was an intense and worthy journalistic campaign, launched by L'Espresso, that saved this jewel from speculation. With a choice that goes against the trend in today's world, on 4 March 1971 Montecristo was declared a State Nature Reserve.
Since 1977, the protection has also been recognized in Europe, including it in the European Network of Biogenetic Reserves of the Council of Europe. With decrees of the Ministry of the Navy of 1979 and 1981 was finally established, on the waters surrounding the island, a biological protection zone for a radius of 500 meters, then increased to 1 km. Only the police and a very select group of hikers arrive here today (the site to book, but 2021 is already sold out), which can only be visited if accompanied by guides, without picking plants and not even thinking of swimming in the sea. It is obviously forbidden to fish and even smoke, without a portable ashtray. But leaving the island exactly as we found it, the feeling remains that something unspeakable is still happening here. That the mysteries of Monte Cristo are not finished yet.
