Elba's walking trails

The highest peak in the Tuscan Archipelago. There are two ways up, and neither is the wrong one.

The cable car leaves from Marciana, a few metres from the village centre at 375 metres, and reaches around 950 metres in eighteen minutes. It was rebuilt in 2005 and the cabins are open yellow cages that you ride standing up, one or two at a time: if heights bother you, know that first — if they don't, you will not forget it.

On foot, path no. 101 from Marciana is the main and simplest route: it climbs gently through a chestnut wood that gives shade even in July, and after about an hour and ten minutes it meets the GTE. Many people ride up and walk down — roughly three hours of descent.

The easternmost peak of the Monte Capanne chain, between Poggio and Sant'Ilario. The good thing about Perone is that you can drive there: the paved road climbs from Poggio through centuries-old chestnuts on the northern side, or up from the Marina di Campo side.

From the pass a short path — around five hundred metres — leads to a viewpoint from which you see both sides of the island at once. It is the place to understand Elba's geography in ten minutes of walking, which is why we suggest it on the first or second day.

For cyclists it is another matter entirely: the climb from Sant'Ilario or San Piero is considered the island's climb, about three kilometres averaging 10% with pitches of 16%.

Above San Piero in Campo, since 2013, a marked route runs through monzogranite formations shaped by water and wind erosion. They all have names, because they really do look like what the name says: the Eagle, the Condor, the Crocodile, Napoleon's Horse, the Giant.

Following path no. 103B you reach the Eagle, and by scrambling onto the big granite boulders you open up a panorama that justifies the climb on its own. It is the most direct way to understand what this half of the island is made of — the same stone the Pisans built half of Tuscany with.

San Piero, where you start, has a twelfth-century church of Saints Peter and Paul built inside a fifteenth-century fortification: worth the stop before or after.

The Calanche ridge is the watershed between the Marciana valleys to the north and those of Pomonte and Vallebuia to the south, and from a distance it is one of Elba's most recognisable sights: sheets of bare granite running down the crests.

We mention it because it is spectacular and because people ask — but it needs saying plainly what it is. Path no. 100, which runs along it, is the only trail in the Elban network graded EEA: expert hikers with equipment. It has exposed sections with an installed via ferrata, narrow passages between rock pinnacles, overhanging slabs and vertical climbs.

It is not a walk, which is why we do not file it with the others. If you have the experience, the gear and — better — a local mountain guide, it is the finest route on the island. If you do not, the view of Le Calanche is perfectly good from the Perone pass, in trainers.