Monte Argentario: Porto Santo Stefano & Porto Ercole
- Mike
- 5 days ago
- 6 min read
The rocky promontory of Monte Argentario is something of an anomaly along the Tuscan coastline because all around it are the flat open spaces of the southern Maremma. It’s not quite an island because there’s a long bridge linking it to Orbetello as well as a sea level causeway on either side connecting it to the coastal road from Grosseto to Rome. Though still well inside Tuscany, Monte Argentario is much closer to Rome than Florence, which has long made it a popular destination for those escaping the summer heat and congestion of Italy’s capital city.
Porto Santo Stefano and Porto Ercole (Hercules) are the two principal towns on the promontory and over the last 11 years we’ve made trips to both of them in every season except high summer and we’ve always enjoyed fine weather, few tourists and great seafood.
Our most recent visit in January proved once again how benign the winter climate can be here because the inland frigid temperatures we experienced disappeared completely as we crossed the water and by lunchtime with the sun out I could have happily been in shorts and a t-shirt.
Porto Santo Stefano is by far the largest of the two towns and sustains a commercial fishing industry in conjunction with Orbetello, with the bay between them supporting a large-scale fish farming operation which we see the results of every week at the fish counter of our local Lucca supermarket - branzino (sea bass) and orata (sea bream) in particular.
The town has two harbors, Porto del Valle and Porto Vecchio. The former is where the fishing boats dock and where the ferry departs for the island of Giglio, taking about an hour. The latter is mainly used for recreational boating and is thronged with bars and restaurants, and rising steeply above it are row after row of apartment buildings jammed in tighter than most building regulations would typically allow.
That’s because after it was bombed to smithereens in WW2, suffering almost 90% destruction, there was a period of rapid rebuilding in the 1950s and 1960s that in fact wasn’t very well regulated. Laws were finally enforced and development ceased but you shouldn’t expect Porto Santo Stefano today to look as pretty as many of the steeply sloping towns on the Riviera di Levante much further north in Liguria with their attractive villas and profusion of palm trees - here it is definitely more of a densely and somewhat haphazardly packed urban environment.
But the casual visitor doesn’t have to worry too much about that unless you’re renting an apartment in the hills in summer, in which case parking will be a nightmare because the building boom didn’t provide for many cars. Out of season we’ve never had much of a problem.
Porto Santo Stefano is a sailing, diving and boating center rather than a beach resort but there are plenty of small beaches nearby.
Within walking distance of the town there are a series of coves with very small but attractive beaches flanked by private villas but the much larger sandy beaches are to be found on the northern Giannella causeway between Orbetello and the open sea.
Here there is a lot of everything - campsites, long sheltered beaches with shallow water and lots of water sports and sailing schools all hidden from the road by a narrow barrier of Mediterranean scrub.
A short drive away from Porto Santo Stefano on the eastern side of Monte Argentario is Porto Ercole. It’s a much smaller and more up-market resort town with fewer apartment buildings and more private villas in the hills and it is also is where the highly rated celebrity-hangout hotel Il Pellicano is to be found. I’m sure it’s luxurious inside but for me at least it’s not in the best location and I think Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor had it right when they chose instead to stay at Boutique Hotel Torre di Cala Piccola.
Burton and Taylor were both married to other people at that time and had only recently met on the Cleopatra film set in Rome in 1962 when their instant mutual attraction resulted in an affair that became a huge scandal at the dawn of the 1960s.
Pursued by the paparazzi they fled Rome in a hurry to find some privacy and Monte Argentario in those days was a very tranquil place that was ideal. Cala Piccola is a small cove, as its name suggests, on the western side of the promontory which affords it breathtaking views of the sunset, the island of Giglio in the Tuscan archipelago and beyond that, Corsica.Â
Only a single member of the paparazzi was clever enough to find them and even he, Marcello Geppetti, managed only one photograph of them strolling along the cove. Geppetti was one of the original group of photographers who inspired Fellini to create the character Paparazzo from which the term for celebrity chasing photographers was born and in a dramatic scoop before their escape to Cala Piccola, Geppetti had taken the now very famous photograph of Burton and Taylor’s first off-screen kiss on the deck of a yacht in Ischia.
If Porto Santo Stefano clings on to this brief moment of celebrity fame then Porto Ercole likes to remind everyone that their town is the place where the brilliant Italian painter Caravaggio drew his last breath.
He suffered a painful death from an infected wound sustained a few days earlier in a street fight in Naples, one of his many brawls in a very colorful life.
Caravaggio was under sentence of death at the time and had arrived in Porto Ercole desperately seeking the felucca which was carrying three of his paintings representing his last hope of obtaining a pardon from the Pope. His remains were discovered in the Church of Saint Erasmus, identified through carbon dating and other records, and exhumed in 2010 exactly 400 years after his death.
Not only is Monte Argentario somewhat cut off from the rest of Tuscany, with a local dialect that is also noticeably different, but its history diverged from the rest of Tuscany with the arrival of the Spanish in 1557.
In that year the Stato dei Presidi (the Garrison State) was taken from Siena's control in a deal involving Cosimo I de Medici who had recently orchestrated the final defeat and subjugation of Siena and who was married to the daughter of the Spanish Viceroy of Naples.
The Stato dei Presidi was a very small territory encompassing only Monte Argentario and nearby Ansedonia with the addition of Talamone after the Spanish took it by force from the French a couple of years later.
It became a very important coastal base for Spain, being strategically placed between Naples and their allies in Genoa, and they reinforced Monte Argentario with infantry and four defensive forts to command and control their ports. In the 18th century the Austrians, the Bourbons and the French all enjoyed periods of dominion and it didn't finally become part of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany until the fall of Napoleon in 1815.
Our accommodation in Porto Santo Stefano on our January visit was cheap and comfortable but unremarkable so not really worthy of mention, but the dinner we had at restaurant Piropo facing the porto vecchio is definitely worthy of mention and recommendation. Piropo is Alessandro di Roberto's restaurant; a native of Porto Santo Stefano he is the youngest of seven brothers from a family of fishermen.
For 18 years he was the chef in a small galley on various luxury yachts that travelled through the Mediterranean and across the Atlantic before returning home for good to open this restaurant in his home town.
He knows the sea and every type of fish and he learned how to cook and improvise in all sorts of ocean conditions.
The test of a good seafood restaurant is always for me the grigliata mista (below right) and the one at Piropo was both excellent and good value, as was the primo piatto of paccheri cozze e pecorino (below left). The fritto calamari e gamberi was gobbled up so quickly I couldn't even get a photo but a good fritto misto is irresistible.
One of the big advantages of off-season travel in Italy is being able to have a leisurely chat with an interesting restaurateur who is not particularly busy, as we did with Alessandro. This is the best way to really get to know a town or region and it's the sort of interaction that is just not possible in the summer.
As we wrote about in our article on San Gimignano, if you want to be a responsible traveler come to places like Monte Argentario when it's less crowded and you'll enjoy it much more.
