He landed on 4 May 1814 in the port fortified by Cosimo de' Medici, between two sixteenth-century fortresses. The Treaty of Fontainebleau had left him full sovereignty over the island, the title of emperor and an income Louis XVIII would never pay. Within days he chose a flag — white with a diagonal red band bearing three bees — and set about governing.
He governed in earnest, and a great deal. Roads, a hospital, street lighting, a land registry, a school, mulberry and vine plantations, reorganisation of the Rio iron mines, regulation of the tuna fishery: in three hundred days he applied to twenty-two thousand people methods designed for forty million. The islanders remember him rather well.
Two residences survive, both turned into national museums. The Villa dei Mulini, between the two forts, overlooks the sea: it is the town house, with its library of two thousand volumes brought from Fontainebleau. The Villa San Martino, in the countryside five kilometres away, served as a summer retreat; its Egyptian room recalls 1798.
The departure was prepared in the harbour itself. On the night of 26 February 1815 the Inconstant, repainted in English colours, sailed with a thousand men while the British commissioner was off the island. Three days later he landed at Golfe-Juan. Portoferraio is the only place in the world where Napoleon was sovereign without conquest and without war.
