The port, as made by Cosimo, still remains, but the defences and engineering works completed by him and his successors are now deserted, or have been turned into the convict prison, the three white columns of whose water-gate form a striking feature in a view of the port. The convicts are here allowed to work at various trades. Workshops are provided within the prison walls, and a show-room for the sale of their goods. The government exacts a small royalty on objects sold. A sentimental interest attaches itself to Portoferraio, as being the place which preserved to mankind a sickly puling infant of the name of Victor Hugo. An epigraph by Mario Foresi, on the walls of the town-hall, commemorates the fact.[13] Along the shore of that part of the gulf, which lies outside the port, the sea looks as though some eccentric gardener had been laying out garden beds in it, with grassy walks between, and white pyramids at irregular intervals. These are the _saline_, where the government makes salt (not very good salt either) for its subjects. It produces about 1,152 tons a year, which it sells at the rate of _3d._ per pound. Truly a government salt monopoly is not a pleasant thing for peasants, who can get salt alone as a condiment for their soup of cabbages and beans, or their mess of maize flour. Ferraio, then, takes its name from the principal product of the island, but the mines are not near the town; they are on the eastern coast, at Rio and at Cape Calamita (Loadstone Cape). Rio, like all other villages in this part of the world, consists of two parts: Rio Alto, whose streets are merely a succession of stairs; and Rio Marina, a modern town, where the mines are. The prevailing colour in Rio Marina is red: red are the hills that shut out the fresh north breezes from the town, red is the sea where the steamers lie off to be loaded, red are the four piers where the trucks go up and down, red the houses, with their curtains, stairs, and furniture. This red ochrous ore is associated, as one ascends the mountain, with the massive and micaceous varieties of hæmatite; so that while one sees red cliffs towering on one side, and solid knobs and blocks of iron, almost native, on the other, one walks over roads that glitter and sparkle like running water, and are almost as slippery as ice. “And Seius, whose eight hundred slaves Sicken in Ilva’s mines,” writes Lord Macaulay; thereby showing that he had never been to Rio. For there is no mining properly so-called here; there is no tunnelling, no blasting on a large scale. The men work in the open air, digging away the red earth, blowing away the harder masses with small charges of powder or getting them out with picks. The earth is washed in a large cistern, with a revolving paddle-wheel, that keeps the water in continual motion; and the iron thus separated from the clay is loaded on to the ships without further refining.