Livorno

From our timetable:

• Olbia — 5 sailings at about 7 h 30 m, with Grimaldi and Moby. The most-searched route from this port by a wide margin, and the gateway to the Costa Smeralda.
• Golfo Aranci — 2 sailings, around 10 hours, with Corsica Sardinia Ferries. A second door onto the same corner of Sardinia.

Both land in the northeast. See the Olbia guide for what the arrival is actually like — and note that Golfo Aranci is a separate town, not a second berth in Olbia.

Bastia is about 4 h 30 m with two sailings each way. It is the shortest island crossing from here and the only one that is comfortably a daytime trip rather than an overnight.

For a driver, this is the practical way to put Corsica and Tuscany in the same holiday. It is also the leg people forget exists, because Corsica reads as French and therefore as somewhere you reach from Marseille or Nice.

Seven and a half hours to Olbia is exactly the awkward length — too long to sit up in a lounge, too short to get a full night's sleep. Ten hours to Golfo Aranci is a proper overnight.

If you are driving off at the far end, book the crossing that lets you arrive rested and drive in daylight, not the one that is cheapest. Sardinian roads in the northeast are good; the ones further in are not, and neither are they lit.

Ferries use the Stazione Marittima at Calata Carrara. Livorno is on the main Tyrrhenian rail line, so arriving by train and walking or taking a short taxi to the port is realistic — unusual for a car-ferry port of this size.

Pisa is about twenty minutes away, with its airport; Florence is roughly an hour and a half. That combination is the reason this port exists where it does: it is the sea gate for the whole of Tuscany.

Livorno's wider network extends to Sicily and to the tiny island of Capraia, and freight sailings run further still. Our timetable currently holds the Sardinian and Corsican routes; the others come and go with season and operator.

If Sicily by sea from Tuscany is the plan, check directly with the operator rather than assuming a sailing exists on your dates — and consider Naples or Civitavecchia as alternatives further south.

Livorno is not on many Tuscan itineraries and the reasons are visible from the ring road, but the old town has a canal quarter — the Venezia Nuova — built when this was the Medici grand duchy's free port, and a fish market that reflects a working harbour rather than a tourist one.

If you have an evening before an overnight sailing, it is a better place to spend it than the terminal car park suggests.

The Sardinian and Corsican routes run year round but thin considerably outside summer, and vehicle space is the constraint rather than passenger seats. July and August book out months ahead in both directions, with the return legs at the end of August the tightest of all.

June and September carry close to the full timetable with real availability. Winter crossings run but on a reduced schedule, and rough Tyrrhenian weather cancels more often than the timetable admits.