Portoferraio is a town and commune on the island of Elba in Livorno Province in the Tuscan archipelago, Italy. It is the island’s largest town and is located on the edge of Portoferraio harbour, whose surrounding buildings occupy the slopes of a tiny hill bordered on three sides by the Tyrrhenian sea. Portoferraio takes its name from the island’s iron ore deposits which brought prosperity in the 19th-centuray, ‘ferro’ being the Italian name for iron whilst ‘ferrovia’ is the Italian for iron (rail) road or railway. The island of Montecristo is administratively part of Portoferraio.