I arrived on Elba too late for Napoleon's funeral.

I know. Even if I had gotten there at the right time -- 1821, the year the emperor died -- Elba would have been the wrong place. Napoleon died on St. Helena, his second island of exile. Long afterward, his body was shipped back to Paris where it remains today in a marble sarcophagus at the Invalides.

But each May a Requiem Mass for the repose of Napoleon's soul is celebrated at the Misericordia church in Portoferraio, Elba's principal town. An empty black coffin is carried down to the waterfront, then put away for another year.

The old man at the Misericordia told me all about it.

The Misericordia is a trim little Palladian bandbox of a church, tucked onto a corner just beyond the point where Via Garibaldi, heading uphill from the harbor, gives up its pretense of being a steep narrow street and turns into a gentle broad stairway called Via Napoloeone. I saw that the doors of the church were open as I climbed the street one day not long after I arrived on Elba, and I walked into the cool nave.

The Misericodia was empty. When I find Italian churches open on a weekday after Mass time, I am used to encountering a sacristan eager to turn up the lights for a few lire, but here there was no one. I stood beneath a wonderful trompe l'oeil ceiling, simulating a lofty dome and lantern. The artist had even painted a bright blue sky, visible through the painted openings at the painted base of the dome. There were fresh flowers on the altar, beneath which was an electrically illuminated glass reliquary containing a skull and bones. A microphone was clipped to the lectern. It was as if the priest and congregation had just disappeared.

I saw a door on the left side of the nave, opening onto a corridor. I walked through the door, turned, and nearly bumped into an old man smoking a cigarette.

"Buona sera," I said to the man.

"Buona sera," he answered, flicking an ash into his cupped hand. "Do you want to see the museum?"

The corridor, it turned out, separated the Misericordia from its erratically open museum, of which the old man was the attendant. He showed me through another door, sat at his desk and took my admission, and told me I was late for Napoleon's funeral.

Napoleon's home in exile

"That's his casket in the next room," he said. "Saturday was the fifth of May, when we have the Mass and procession. Every year."

Sure enough, the black coffin said "Napoleon," in gold letters. Arrayed nearby were other mementos of the emperor's stay on Elba, including a bronze death mask, and a cast of the hand that directed the affairs of a continent. I looked around, 2,000 lire worth, but I was still curious about one thing. "Whose bones are those," I asked the old man, "beneath the altar in the church?"

"The bones of St. Cristino," he told me. "The patron saint of Portoferraio."

But Portoferraio, and all of Elba, has long since had a secular patron saint -- the decidedly unsaintly man whose death mask I had just contemplated. This is one of those places forever associated with a single individual, a fact ironic for his having lived here not quite 10 months. Elba today is a solid component of the island tourism establishment of the Mediterranean, a place that welcomes busloads of Germans and Britons who ferry the seven miles from the Tuscan mainland. But it stands apart, as the Place They Sent Napoleon.

By the time the third or fourth person had recited the palindrome "Able was I ere I saw Elba" when hearing where I was off to, I had decided to experience as much as I could of non-Napoleonic Elba. Missing the funeral, I suppose, was a good way to start.

Guest room ceiling at Villa Ottone

Elba was going about its business long before it became a holding pen for a conqueror who, interestingly enough, hailed from a larger island just 30 miles to the west -- Corsica. Elba's proximity to the Italian mainland, of course, meant that its influences have primarily come from that direction. The island's rich deposits of copper and iron provisioned the Bronze and Iron ages. The Etruscans were an early presence, as were the Greeks. But, like the rest of the Mediterranean, Elba was destined to become Roman. Rome ruled the island by 300 B.C., and made copious use of mines that yielded iron ore right up to the 1980s. The Romans even introduced vacation home ownership to Elba: I walked amidst the foundations of one of their seaside villas right at harborside in Portoferraio, admiring the still-vivid geometry of a terrazzo floor. It looked as if a damp towel might have been tossed on it that morning, to be picked up by a slave.

Elba's insularity gave it no reprieve from the chaos and marauding that characterized the half-millennium following the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, but stability finally arrived in the form of Pisan rule. Pisa, in those days an independent city-state with its own maritime empire, ruled Elba from the 11th to the 16th centuries. Next came Florence's Medici, who built much of the Portoferraio that exists today. The Spanish, the French, and the Tuscans all had their turn, until Elba finally became a part of unified Italy in the 1860s. "Italy," one native Elban told me, "is where people from the island sometimes say they're going, when they are referring to the mainland."

I didn't have to walk the tight, twisting streets of Portoferraio for long to realize that much of its physical character -- and that of Elba itself -- stems from centuries of trying to keep out the other guys, whoever they happened to be at the moment. The island is splendidly suited for defense. Roughly 20 miles long and 10 miles wide at its greatest extreme, Elba is a jumble of steep peaks through which roads must follow wildly circuitous valley floors and mountain switchbacks. A few more ridges, and they wouldn't have been able to build an airport.

Portoferraio wraps around a horseshoe-shaped harbor, from which the streets lead uphill in nearly every direction. Rising from one side of the harbor, the walls of a 16th century Medici fortress embrace the old quarter. At the end of the spit that defines the other arm of the horseshoe, a squat round Martello tower commands the harbor entrance. It was all too much for the French-backed Turkish pirate Dracut, who in 1553 took one look at the defenses, turned his fleet seaward, and left.

As I circled the land side of the Martello tower, much of the brickwork seemed oddly even and regular, its mortar hardly weathered. I asked the attendants at the adjacent archaeological museum why this was, and they showed me a photograph. It was of the same tower, half-pulverized by explosives more powerful than anything a Turkish pirate might have been packing. "American bombs," one of the attendants said. "Nineteen forty-four."

Not 20 yards away was that remnant of terrazzo floor I had admired, in the remains of the Roman villa.

Outside of Portoferraio itself, the most dramatic of Elba's defenses is the gaunt ruined fortress atop the mountain called Volterraio, which rises like the frozen crest of a 1,300-foot wave amidst the range of hills that divide the central plain from the island's eastern peninsulas. The fortress was built by the Pisan rulers of Elba in the 11th century, and from the valley below, it seems not merely unassailable but nearly unreachable.

There is a path, though, beginning alongside the narrow road that snakes along Volterraio's western slopes. Early one morning I parked my Fiat at the turnoff and began the trek to the summit. The path wove through the dense brush called macchia , passing clearings bright with Elba's ubiquitous red poppies, and ascended amidst jagged fragments of fallen rock. At the top of this scree-slope -- surprisingly, less than a half-hour from my car -- I stood facing the grim walls of the fortress. There was no flat ground on the summit, and there were only two ways into the ruins: I could crawl through a dogleg tunnel at foundation level, or I could find the hand- and footholds necessary to climb eight feet to a wide opening in the west wall.

I chose the daylight route, and clambered through what seemed like a glassless medieval picture window. Inside were toppled stones and ragged vegetation. A gnarled tree grew at the center, and along the periphery were the broken hulks of barracks, storerooms, perhaps a chapel. Poppies, those pretty postscripts to human belligerence, grew everywhere.

I climbed a stone staircase to a parapet. For a moment I was an arrogant Pisan general, looking down on Portoferraio and its harbor, all mine. At the other end of the parapet, peering over the sheer side of Volterraio's frozen wave, I imagined the hopelessness of any invader gazing up at this impossible pile. Then general and invader alike disappeared. I looked out across the ruddy ribs of Elba, protruding through the dark green macchia , then at the wreck of stone all around me, and saw the massive indifference of time.

Looking down from Volterraio, I was especially drawn to a single simple building, little more than an elongated white cubicle on a knoll. It looked like a rural Roman temple to a minor god, and I wasn't surprised, when I asked at my hotel, to learn that it was a church so old that it might easily have been built on a site sacred in antiquity -- the early Christians had a penchant for de-paganizing such places by putting up their own houses of worship.

All that was speculation. San Stefano, when I found it, turned out to have been built by the Pisans perhaps no more than 100 years after the fortress on Volterraio. It was hardly bigger than a Victorian mausoleum, and nowhere near as ornate. The only obvious decoration on this squat box of flinty local stone was a cutout cross on its low front gable, and a trio of shallow, recessed arches along the faŤade. But when I walked the church's perimeter, I found several small, worn carvings on stones within the side and back walls. There was a bird, a leaf and flowers, a mask-like human face; oddest of all was a wolf or dog that appeared to be licking its paw. It was all kindergarten work, and it was almost impossible to believe that it predated Donatello by only two or three centuries, not millennia.

Along with the blunt honest structure itself, the carvings had such primitive power that I returned to see the interior during a posted Wednesday service, only to find the little church closed. But someone, probably many people, had come to San Stefano between my visits. There was a clutch of baby's breath, a bride's bouquet, tied to the front railing.

The lanes that led from San Stefano back to the coast road and my hotel took me through vineyards bright with new spring growth. A man was pruning vines right at the roadside, and I stopped to ask him if it looked to be a good year.

"No," he said. "We had a frost, at Easter. We almost never have a frost here, but this year, in some places we may have lost almost three-quarters of the grapes." He showed me a stunted cluster, quite literally nipped in the bud.

I had been enjoying the Elban wines of recent, more bountiful years, and had been particularly fond of a bottle I had drunk with gnocchi and grilled squid the night before. I'd jotted down the name of the vineyard, Sapere, and the fact that this clean-lined white was said to be "biologico." I wasn't at all sure just what a biological wine might be.

Typical village on Elba

I hopped into the Fiat and went looking for the Sapere vineyard, certain only that it was somewhere outside of Porto Azzurro, near Elba's southeastern corner. No problem -- on an island described by Pliny nearly 2,000 years ago as "fecund of wine," they put up road signs telling you where the vineyards are. I arrived at Sapere to find a tasting and sales room glowered over by the mounted heads of island boars, a display of antique winemaking equipment and corkscrews, and a tour bus group being addressed by a pretty young blond woman with what I decided was the best command of German I'd ever encountered in an Italian.

When the tourists had dispersed to pick out their purchases, I approached the woman to ask her about biological wine. But first I told her, "Your German is excellent."

"I am German," she said in impeccable English.

Jana Adrian was from somewhere up in Schleswig-Holstein; three years ago, she had traveled to Elba and met "a beautiful boy with green eyes." That was native Elban Dario Trambusti, the tall young man with a roiling cascade of wavy brown hair working today on the bottling machine. Jana has been on the island ever since -- as Dario later told me, "my friends are jealous, because their German girlfriends usually go home after the summer."

In her three-year summer on Elba, Jana has become an expert on the local wines. "Biologico," she told me, is the equivalent of the English "organic." The proprietors of the vineyard, third-generation winemaker Italo Sapere and his wife Thea, are turning increasingly to this method of production, eventually hoping to craft only organic wines.

When Jana introduced me to Thea, I solved another puzzle posed by the label I had studied at the restaurant the night before. "Vigna Thea," it had said. Vigna means vineyard, and Italo Sapere had proposed putting his wife's name on all of the company's top-of-the-line products. "Now, I'm not so sure I like it," Thea told me. "People are always saying 'Vigna Thea' when they meet me. Maybe I should change my name."

"You could change it to Vigna," I said. Stuck with fame, she laughed.

Jana showed me some of the Sapere vines, and confirmed what the man near San Stefano had said about the frost. Back inside, in the cellar, I took a quick tutorial in the red wines made from Sapere's Sangiovese grapes, and the dry whites built primarily upon the Procanico. But most impressive of all was Aleatico, crafted from the grapes of the same name that are allowed, before crushing and fermentation, to dry somewhat and concentrate their nectar. "During that time they absorb the aromas of the macchia ," Jana explained. "The wine might pick up a hint or rosemary, in some years even cherry."

Two nights later, I enjoyed three or four glasses of Aleatico with the little almond biscuits called cantucci, after a fine meal at the home of Jana and Dario beside the Sapere vineyards. When I had arrived, Italo Sapere was helping Dario plant tomatoes. Alongside the patio was an olive tree, and a cool spring breeze came down from the mountains. Thea, Jana, and I sat outside and drank Sapere wines along with a white made by Dario's father, who pilots one of the ferries between Elba and Livorno. When Dario was finished with the tomatoes, he took out his guitar.

Later, as the Aleatico and Dario's homemade sweet Moscato flowed, we heard someone else's guitar. Dario had gone over to the stereo, telling me that hearing me talk had made him think of a CD he wanted to play. It was Bruce Springsteen. You can never get rid of a Jersey accent; I carry mine around like my passport. We opened another bottle of wine, and listened to the Boss.

Late one morning, as the haze that had lingered over the island for the past several days lifted everywhere except on the far horizons, I headed south and west out of Portoferraio to begin the drive along the road that clings to the steep slopes along Elba's western shores, hugging that corner of the Mediterranean called the Tyrrhenian Sea.

Mare nostrum , the Romans called the Mediterranean -- our sea. If you were to have a sea, you would want this one: it might be considered the greatest part of the good fortune Rome enjoyed for over a thousand years, or better still, the very font of that good fortune. Womb, cradle, and nourishment . . . for the billion or so of its children alive today, the Mediterranean is all of these things.

Lift to Monte Capanne

And it looked especially beautiful, on this day when the distant haze made a blur of the line between sea and sky, and Corsica was only a faint suggestion on the horizon. I stopped on the roadside, at a place where the national park service had put a picnic table. The road and pullover together were a mere shelf cut into a slope that fell straight away to the red roofs of Cape San Andrea and the cobalt sea beyond, and rose behind me, thick with macchia, to the heights of Elba's rooftop, Monte Capanne.

I had stopped earlier on my drive at Seccheto, a village on Elba's southeast coast where the Romans had quarried the granite for the Pantheon. My requirements at Seccheto were simpler -- a crusty roll, a hundred grams of hard salami, a bag of olives, a bottle of red Elban wine and an ethereal little lemon tart. I ate my lunch, and looked out at Mare Nostrum. Just as I lay back and closed my eyes for a nap, an old man with a scythe emerged from the macchia on the land side of the road and disappeared down a footpath to San Andrea, as if out of an antique dream. I fell asleep, and he carried his scythe down to the sea. Maybe I was part of his dream, an old Elban waking dream in which napping tourists follow the Etruscans and Romans and Pisans and Genoese, follow the Medici and the Spanish and French and that strange cobbled-together entity called Italy. It's all the same in the old man's dream, only now the Germans come on buses, or wear bicycle helmets.

Monte Capanne looms over all the western part of Elba -- indeed, its 3,345-foot summit is visible throughout the island. That summit is easily accessible, by means of one of the most bizarre contrivances ever devised for ascending a mountain. When I read that it was called the "Cabinovia," I assumed it involved some sort of cabin. Instead, I arrived at the base station to find a sort of stand-up chairlift. The Cabinovia consists of a cable suspending a series of yellow steel cages with waist-high railings. Each cage holds two people. An attendant stations riders at markers eight or ten feet apart, and signals each to jump in as the cage swings past. Then he closes the gate, and off you go, on a serene and delightful ride that would send an American insurance company into corporate apoplexy.

It wasn't very busy that day, and I rode alone in my Cabinovia cage. One village after another appeared as the cable pulled me higher up Monte Capanne, so many jumbles of spilled red-and-tan Legos cupped in the folds of the green hills. At the top, where you hop off the way you hop on, there was a view of all creation from the Tuscan hills to Corsica, and a bar.

I had been to the top of Elba, I had all but circled it in the Fiat, I had scaled its fortresses and dined with its winemakers. But I still had not visited the place that lifts it from the mere gazetteer of Mediterranean islands, and emblazons it on the map of world history.

If I ever get sent into exile, I wouldn't mind a setup like Napoleon's. He was the emperor of Elba, with a court, a household staff, even a miniature army and navy. There was a British commissioner around to keep an eye on things (not a very keen eye, as it turned out), but the island was actually Bonaparte's to run. He improved the roads, the postal service, and the schools. He increased Elba's wine production. According to one resident I spoke with, he even streamlined trash collection by assembling a squad of boys who would appear with wicker baskets beneath the windows of Portoferraio's houses, whistling for the day's deposits. If the technology had been available, he probably would have built the Cabinovia.

Seaside lunch near San Andrea

Napoleon also got a nice place to live. The Villa dei Mulini stands facing a quiet, nondescript square in the highest part of Portoferraio. I drove there one humid day when I didn't care to walk -- I'm not sure, but I think I steered the Fiat up a flight of stairs and through someone's kitchen -- and was initially surprised at how modest the residence was. (So was the country retreat Napoleon built a few months after he got here, although wings added long afterward made it bulky and formal.) Appropriately, the Mulini is furnished in Empire style, although few of the emperor's original possessions are in place aside from his gilt bed and his library of books with "N" stamped on their red morocco bindings.

I followed the tour route through the reception room, the library, the bedroom, and various salons, trying to keep a good distance behind a field-trip gaggle of Italian schoolchildren who were hooting and yammering and having a non-educational good time. The Mulini looked like any respectable dwelling from an era in which the upper middle classes lived like what we could call magnificoes, their only concession to economy a little trompe l'oeil brushwork in lieu of real three-dimensional detail in marble. And then I came to Naploeon's study, with its views across a formal garden perched on a cliff above the sea. That calm study, the jasmine-scented garden, and the vista of blue water beyond seemed an Olympian setting in which to live out one's days.

But in less than a year's time, the pull of the great tumultuous world on the other side of that serene view became too much to resist. Napoleon slipped away to the French coast, reassembled his army, and embarked upon the hundred-day fit of desperation that led to Waterloo and to his final, far humbler exile on hopelessly remote St. Helena. If he had stayed on Elba, growing fat and old and benign -- perhaps running a vineyard -- he would not, of course, have been the restless man he was.

And they probably wouldn't be holding his funeral here each year.