Campo nell'Elba

In the middle ages Campo was two hill villages, San Piero in Campo and Sant'Ilario in Campo, and the name came from the plain below them — campus — which was however a wetland, so much so that they called it the Maremma of Elba. Only in the following centuries did a settlement grow down by the sea, Port'i Campo, around the tower attested from 1596 and the little church of San Gaetano da Thiene: it is today's Marina di Campo, which is now the seat of the comune. The territory also takes in the island of Pianosa and the islet of Scola, and on Pianosa there are the catacombs, the Palazzo della Specola, a lighthouse and the forts; the only airport of Elba is here, at La Pila. Near Marina di Campo stands instead the church of San Mamiliano, perhaps proto-Romanesque, documented from the fourteenth century, which keeps some bone relics of the saint.

The coat of arms, granted in 1897, tells the whole comune: a round crenellated tower above a grassy mount whose peaks stand for the hamlets, and the mount slopes down to the sea from which Pianosa appears. At the top, though, there are three golden bees, and those are Napoleon's: they recall the year the emperor spent on Elba. In 1905 the comune also obtained a flag, party per bend red and blue, with the three bees walking along the division. The rest of the territory is full of far older things: the Sassi Ritti and the megalithic circle of Monte Còcchero, the Neolithic site of the Masso alla Guata, the necropolis of the Piane alla Sughera, the Etruscan settlement of Castiglione di Campo, and the medieval granite quarries of San Piero and of the Grottarelle, from which the island's stone set off for the mainland.