Montecristo
— — a granite island the sea keeps for itself.
Not only on a wall.
“A pyramid of pink granite rising straight from the Tyrrhenian, kept as a state nature reserve since 1971. The Camaldolese monastery the novel made famous sits in ruin on the western slope, abandoned after Barbary corsairs sacked it in the 1500s. Access is restricted to about a thousand visitors a year, by booked guided landing only, with a long waiting list. The Tyrrhenian wild goat and the Discoglossus sardus frog hold the island; the rest is rock, scrub, and birds.
Montecristo, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Montecristo is a granite island of 10.4 square kilometres in the southern Tyrrhenian Sea, 40 kilometres south of Elba, in the province of Livorno, Tuscany. Its high point, Monte della Fortezza, rises to 645 metres almost straight from the water. The island has been an Italian state nature reserve since 1971 and forms part of the Tuscan Archipelago National Park, established in 1996. Edmond Dantès made the name a household word through the 1844 Alexandre Dumas novel, though Dumas never landed on the island. The reserve is biogenetic and listed under the Council of Europe's diploma for protected areas.
Montecristo is a single intrusion of pinkish two-mica granite, roughly seven million years old, lifted from the seafloor by Tyrrhenian tectonics. The slopes are nearly bare, with macchia scrub of myrtle, juniper, and Helichrysum holding the shallow soil. The Camaldolese abbey of San Mamiliano sits in ruin on the western flank at about 340 metres; monks founded it in the seventh century, fortified it in the medieval period, and abandoned it after repeated raids by Barbary corsairs in the 1500s. The Cala Maestra anchorage on the north coast is the only landing, with a small Savoyard royal villa beside it.
Access to Montecristo is one of the most restricted in Italy. The reserve admits roughly 1,000 visitors a year by booked guided day landing only, organised through the Tuscan Archipelago park authority from Piombino or Porto Santo Stefano. Wait lists for the educational visits commonly run two to three years. Landings happen between April and July to protect the seabird and goat breeding seasons; the rest of the year the island is closed entirely. Anchoring within one nautical mile of the coast is prohibited under reserve rules.