Race for the riches of Montecristo
It is a mere speck of rocks and ruins in the Mediterranean, the refuge of seals and dolphins, egrets and peregrine falcons, where the rabbits and wild goats browse at will and the broom and thyme send up their strong scents under the hot sun.
But when the Italian government announced it was cutting its national parks budget by half, the future of the Isle of Montecristo was suddenly thrown into question.
Forty-five kilometres south of Elba, less than 11 sq km in area and practically uninhabited for centuries, Montecristo is the last pristine wilderness in the Mediterranean. It is also one of those rare places where, to date, the impact of modern man has been entirely positive: for the past 40 years it has been a nature reserve, closed to the outside world, its sanctity patrolled by the handful of forest guards who take turns to guard it.
That situation has barely changed since it was announced two years ago that up to 1,000 members of the public would be allowed to visit the island every year. As it takes a year or more to obtain a permit, many applicants simply lost interest.
The forest guards, meanwhile, continue to guard their charge jealously: when a journalist from La Stampa visited recently, five young French tourists in a rubber dinghy had just been caught trying to land on the island; their vessel was confiscated and they were deported back to Elba.
But the announcement of a drastic budget cut has brought a sudden end to Montecristo's decades of serenity. Mario Tozzi, director of the National Park of the Tuscany Archipelago, to which the island belongs, has given his grudging consent to the idea of charging visitors to the island €50 (£41) per trip, to offset the costs of looking after it. But according to Enrico Cervetti, deputy head of the park's keepers, "the costs of managing the island are crazy".
It is an open question whether the Berlusconi government, in its hunger for savings, will be satisfied with the meagre annual income that a few hundred nature-lovers would bring.
Because there is another possible future for the island – one closely aligned to the sort of up-market coastal development Mr Berlusconi's brother Paolo has been pushing for years in Sardinia. During the 1960s a company called Oglasa (an archaic name for the island) launched a bid to build an "elite" yacht harbour and resort in Montecristo.
The scheme was thwarted when the island was taken under state protection in 1971, but with state coffers now empty and the national park agency, according to Tozzi, faced with the choice "of either closing half the parks, roughly speaking, or sacking half the staff," it may only be a matter of time before Montecristo is auctioned off to the highest bidder.
drive from www.independnet.co.uk