A small island with a long memory

The day La Maddalena turned back Napoleon

In the winter of 1793, revolutionary France was at war with the Kingdom of Sardinia. A French expedition — some twenty ships and several hundred men under Pietro Paolo Colonna-Cesari — sailed from Corsica to take the archipelago. Among the young officers directing its artillery was a Corsican lieutenant named Napoleon Bonaparte.

The French seized the little island of Santo Stefano and from there bombarded the town of La Maddalena. A cannonball said to date from that shelling — remembered locally as “Napoleon’s ball” — is still kept in the town hall.

The town square named for the date of the battle.

The defence fell to a local helmsman of the Royal Sardinian Navy, Domenico Millelire. Through the night of 22 February he ran guns to the shore batteries and turned his cannon on the French flotilla. On the 25th, in a single small gunboat, he slipped in among the enemy ships and threw them into such disorder that the expedition broke off and withdrew to Corsica.

For that defence Millelire was awarded, in 1793, the first Gold Medal of Military Valour ever granted — the very first recipient in the decoration’s history — along with a lifelong pension. A young Napoleon, who would one day rule much of Europe, had been handed his first defeat at a fisherman’s island. La Maddalena has not forgotten: it keeps his memory in the Piazza 23 Febbraio and the bust above the harbour, and the Italian Navy has carried his name to sea ever since.

Nelson’s two years at anchor

A decade after Napoleon’s failure, the same waters drew his great rival. From 1803, with Britain again at war with France, Admiral Horatio Nelson made the deep, sheltered anchorage between La Maddalena and Santo Stefano — which the fleet called Agincourt Sound — his forward base for the long blockade of the French fleet at Toulon. His flagship, HMS Victory, first dropped anchor on 31 October 1803.

Over the next fifteen months he returned eight times, spending some seventy-nine days in the archipelago — by most accounts never once setting foot ashore. He prized the place: he is said to have called it, at the northern tip of Sardinia, “the most beautiful port in the world,” and pressed his government — in vain — to take Sardinia for the Crown.

Nelson’s gift of silver is still kept in the parish church.

In gratitude for the islanders’ hospitality, in October 1804 Nelson sent two solid-silver candlesticks and a silver crucifix to the parish church of Santa Maria Maddalena. They are there to this day. His last departure was on 19 January 1805; nine months later he was killed in victory at Trafalgar.

Caprera, and the hero who chose it

Giuseppe Garibaldi — the “Hero of Two Worlds,” whose volunteers would hand Sicily and Naples to a united Italy — first set foot on neighbouring Caprera on 25 September 1849, a fugitive arriving from Tunis after the fall of the Roman Republic, his wife Anita newly dead. He would make the island his home for the rest of his life.

He came back to stay. In 1855, with a legacy from his brother, he bought the northern half of Caprera; the southern half belonged to an English couple, Richard and Emma Collins, and only years later did funds raised by his sons and admirers let him buy that too. He lived first in a restored sheepfold and a wooden cabin shipped from Nice, then built the Casa Bianca — the White House — in the low, whitewashed style of the South American ranches he had known.

Garibaldi’s house and grave are now a national monument.

On Caprera the revolutionary became a farmer — planting trees, breeding horses and sheep, and keeping donkeys he named, for his own amusement, after his enemies. The island was his refuge between campaigns and, at times, his cage: after his failed marches on Rome in 1862 and 1867, the new Italian state effectively confined him here. He died in the Casa Bianca on 2 June 1882, aged 74, his bed turned to the window and the sea; the clock in the room is still stopped at 6:21 in the evening.

He had asked to be cremated on a pyre by the shore; the wish was overruled, and he was buried instead beneath a rough block of unworked granite in the family cemetery behind the house — plain, exactly as he had instructed. His home is now the Compendio Garibaldino, reached by boat from La Maddalena’s harbour. The town took him as its own: to this day its coat of arms is the Lion of Caprera — Garibaldi, rampant on the rock of the island he chose.

Villa Webber, and a fallen dictator

In 1850 an eccentric, much-travelled Englishman settled on La Maddalena and fell for it. James Phillipps Webber — born in Wales, a pioneer of the wine trade in colonial Australia before he turned merchant — built, between 1855 and 1857, a fortress-like villa in Moorish style on the highest point of the island, ringed by thick walls and a pine wood he planted himself, and filled it with paintings and a celebrated library. He never married; on his death in 1877 the house passed to his adopted family, who lived there until 1928. The books and art then vanished — the “Lost Library of Villa Webber.”

The hilltop villa, abandoned for decades, still stands above the town.

The villa’s strangest hour came in the Second World War. After the Grand Council of Fascism brought him down and the King had him arrested on 25 July 1943, Benito Mussolini was moved in secret from place to place. From 7 to 27 August 1943 he was held at Villa Webber, its hilltop isolation thought easy to guard. It was not: he was seen walking the grounds and taking coffee in town, and word spread within days. He was sealed inside, then moved to a mountain hotel on the Gran Sasso, from which German commandos snatched him that September.

The island that had turned back one would-be ruler of Europe had, a century and a half later, briefly held another — at his end.