The municipality of Rio Marina is in the Island of Elba. Inside the town the Roman Villa can be visited.

The archaeological excavations made in the area of Rio Marina have shown the presence of nomadic hunting groups in the Paleolithic period. They were later substituted by settlements of metal searchers, mainly looking for copper, who triggered the thousand-year-old history of mining in the Island of Elba.
In the Etrurian age, the area was dominated by the city of Populonia. Later, both cities and the Corsica island fell under the Romans during the first Punic War (III century B.C.).
After the heavy depopulation in the Early Middle Ages, the settlements in Elba started to proliferate again around the year 1000 under the aegis of the Republic of Pisa.
During this period, the name of Rio began to appear associated to the name of Grassula in the documents of the Episcopal curia of Pisa. Rio, as well as the whole island, entered the Principality of Piombino under the Gherardo d' Appiano's seigniory at the end of the XIV century.
Throughout the following centuries, the pirates represented the major problem for the inhabitants of Rio. Their incursions mainly intensified between the XV and the XVI centuries and led to the destruction of Grassula and to the deportation of its inhabitants under the pirate Barbarossa in 1543.
It was necessary to wait the XVII century to find the courage for returning on these unsafe places, because then the forays started to weaken thanks to the presence of the Spanish in Longone and of the Florentines in Cosmopoli (Portoferraio).
Always in the XVII century, Rio started to create its first own statutes. With the extinction of the Appiano family in 1661, the Ludovisi-Boncompagni took the lead of the town and they invested very much in mining to foster it and make it a more profitable activity, considering the inhabitants of Rio as the main source for labour.
In this period when the pirates' incursions had already come to an end, many ship owners, sailors coming from Liguria and Corsica and the first fishing communities moved to the seacoasts of Rio. This is how Marina di Rio developed.
A second immigration wave occurred after the XIX century. Once the Napoleonic occupation ended, the industrial exploitation of mines had already started and the Lorraine family further financed the improvement of the necessary infrastructures when they took possession of Elba after the Congress of Vienna in 1815.
At the end of the century, Marina di Rio had already entered the new Kingdom of Italy and it had its own high-level ruling class and its own naval fleet.
Consequently, its detachment from the municipality of Rio, the currently called Rio nell'Elba, was carried out, as well as the proclamation of Rio Marina as an autonomous municipality in 1881