The Tuscan Coast is dotted by lots of incredible surprises and little gems, among them being the vibrant seaside city of Viareggio in the Province of Livorno and its epic Carnival celebrations and the famous Elba Island, to which Napoleon was notoriously exiled. Not far from Elba is another, lesser-known delight, the island of Pianosa. One of the smallest islands in the Tuscan Archipelago, it is an almost entirely uninhabited beauty located in the glimmering Tyrrhenian Sea and is a must-see for those who have found a vacation rental on the Tuscan Coast and are interested in exploring the most interesting and lovely hidden corners of the area.
So incredibly flat that it is barely visible, and often described merely as looking like a darker blue line in the sea, Pianosa was first inhabited in the late Stone Age and then was a Roman settlement before Pisa and Genoa began to fight over the land in the 12th and 13th centuries. Variously inhabited by pirates, fishing colonies, and military officers, the island became a maximum security prison in 1868 and remained home to prisoners, with many particularly dangerous Mafia criminals among them, until 1998. Upon the closure of the prison, almost everyone left with just a few people remaining on the island today.
So incredibly flat that it is barely visible, and often described merely as looking like a darker blue line in the sea, Pianosa was first inhabited in the late Stone Age and then was a Roman settlement before Pisa and Genoa began to fight over the land in the 12th and 13th centuries. Variously inhabited by pirates, fishing colonies, and military officers, the island became a maximum security prison in 1868 and remained home to prisoners, with many particularly dangerous Mafia criminals among them, until 1998. Upon the closure of the prison, almost everyone left with just a few people remaining on the island today.
