SURELY no city in the world queens it over the waves so completely as does Portoferraio. She rides them imperiously, lifting high the turrets that are her crown and defence; she decks herself in the brightest colours, conscious of her beauty; and sets herself boldly on the very head and front of the dark blue waters that wash her feet or leap up in wrath at her pride, yet never injure her. Genoa is called the Superb, but the epithet rises more spontaneously to the mind on view of the capital of the Island of Elba. Portoferraio was originally one of those headlands, so characteristic of Elba, that grow out from the mainland on a narrow stalk, and then widen and heighten into rocky peninsulas. It is now, however, an island, for Cosimo I., Duke of Tuscany, cut a moat through the stalk, and severed the peninsula from the mainland. The peninsula consists of two heights, on one of which is the fort known as the Falcone, on the other, that of the Stella; and these are bound together by a lofty wall, within the castellations of which sentinels could walk without descending into the town. Immediately below each fort, a bank of concrete, kept in former times very clean and free from growth, formed a water-shed for the rain which streamed down it into a cistern below. At present the concrete, though still railed in, is quite overgrown, for the city boasts a water-supply brought down from the neighbouring hills. Round the forts are spacious granite-paved squares on which considerable bodies of men could manœuvre; and below cluster the red-roofed, green-shuttered houses, whose inhabitants sleep, in Oriental fashion, through the heat of the day, coming out in the evening to walk among the oleanders of _Le Ghiaie_—a tiny park above a beach of the whitest gravel (_ghiaia_)—or to dance with the officers in the new bathing establishment, of which they are so proud. Down again, at the foot of the houses, lies the port, a semi-circle pointed at the southern end by the pink-washed tumble-down offices of the sanitary inspector, at the northern end by the octagonal tower of the convict prison. Soldiers, convicts, “society,” trade, all hive on those two little hills, and the only opening through which workers and drones can pass in and out on the landside is a low-browed gateway, bearing the Medici arms, and overlooking a plank bridge spanning the moat of sea-water. Within the gateway is a wide, open space, through which one passes up the first ramparts of the Falcone, to a wonderful winding tunnel, hewn in the solid rock. This brings one out through another gate, into the flaunting little city. The tunnel is known as _La Tromba_ (the trumpet-shaped), and was the work, as usual, of Cosimo’s engineer.