There is a small island on the north western tip of Sardinia which has been closed to visitors for many, many years. Reading about in the pilot and guide books made it sound forbidding and forbidden, not somewhere to catch our attention.
Then, in England in late May, Sarah picked up June's Yachting Monthly, and it contained an article which hymned Asinara as a virgin paradise, with luxuriant sealife, very few visitors and beautiful seas. So we went to have a look.
The biggest bay on Asinara is called Cala Della Realle, and this was the centre of officialdom when the island was a prison. Like other Italian islands, such as Capraiait was a penal colony for 100 years, including WW1 Austro-Hungarian prisoners (whose chapel still stands), the Ethiopian royal family during Mussolini's adventurism in Africa, and then senior Mafia cons. The most senior royal was Haile Selassie's daughter, Princess Romanework, who sadly died in 1941, before her country's liberation. Only in 1997 was Asinara re-opened, the convicts sent elsewhere and the whole island declared a reserve. Its marine fringe is particularly important, having seen so little activity to damage the seabed or pollute the water.