I spent two weeks in Torino recently. Like many others, I didn’t go there for sightseeing. I had some medical checkups, and one of the best hospitals in Italy is in Torino. But while I was there, I had the opportunity to experience the city.

I’ll get straight to the point this time: we liked it so much that we are moving there.

See, in Italy, or in any other country that experiences mass tourism, it’s hard to find a place which still belongs to the locals. And unlike other countries, Italy is the worst place to find truly local places. In Spain, you can hide in less popular beach towns or even in cities like Zaragoza or Valencia, which are totally enjoyable as a local. In France, most people converge on Paris, Provence, or the Côte d’Azur. You can still ‘hide’ in Normandy, for example. Some of the Greek islands are still untouched by the Santorini and Mykonos Instagram hype.

In Italy, though, almost the entire country is an open-air museum, and no matter where you are, within a 2-hour drive, you are either on the beach swimming or in the mountains hiking and skiing, on the same day. This country has the most UNESCO sites, the most museums, and the highest concentration of artwork on the planet, and there is the food, which is arguably among the most popular cuisines in the world.

So finding a place which is not flooded by Instagram influencers is kinda challenging. Generally, you have two options.

Option one is a small commune either in the mountains or a quiet beach town that is alive between June and September, and the rest of the year is quiet and local. This is, by the way, our solution. We live in Marina di Pietrasanta. The place is crowded during the summer, empty the rest of the year. The people are gone, but the sea stays, with its food, local events, and everything that the town has to offer anyway. But this is nowhere near a city. For that, we have to drive at least 30 minutes to reach Lucca or Pisa. And they are crowded with tourists mostly year-round anyway, so kinda annoying to go around.

Option two is to find a city that is totally off from tourist maps. It is almost impossible and only a few regional capitals qualify. Torino is a fresh exception.

Torino is a city with all its might and services. Despite it being full of Baroque palazzi and Belle Époque cafés, built when the Savoy monarchs ran their kingdom from here, and laid out with grandiose boulevards, most people think of Torino as a working-class city, sort of like the Detroit of Italy (Fiat/Stellantis is based here).

The city has many layers. The latest is the hipster, foodie, intellectual city with many cultural events and a center of research and innovation. But the best about it is a simple fact: it belongs to the locals. Thankfully, it is overshadowed by its big cousin, Milano, and the Instagram-vultures are flocking to Lake Como and never make it to Torino. And the irony is that the espresso machine itself was patented here in 1884, and Lavazza was founded here too, so the coffee actually came from Torino, not from Como, but who cares about the details on Instagram anyway.

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Torino has everything that you wish for if you live in Italy. The food. The cafés. The proximity to the sea or the mountains. Even the Italian lifestyle is there, even though people in Torino are more reserved than their Southern friends. And you have all that without lines of tourists, people pulling their luggage, selfie sticks, and overpriced local shops that price for tourists, not locals.

So we are moving there soon. I guess this might be the most Italian thing we have ever done since we moved here: live in an underrated Italian city that fully caters to locals, while having a small place by the sea where you can sometimes escape.

A dopo,

Peter

Pietrasanta (for now), 21 June 2026

PS: Expect more from Piemonte and Torino starting September.

New guide about the Arno corridor

The new guide about the Arno corridor is live. We’re doing this a bit unusually. We had a guide on Versilia and the Lunigiana, and now one on the Arno corridor. This is a long stretch from Firenze to the sea, and you can do it in two ways: towards Lucca to reach Versilia, or towards Pisa to reach Livorno. Both viable. The guide covers both.

The next and last guide about Tuscany will cover the mainland, the part that probably comes to mind when you think “Tuscany,” with the cypress streets, winding roads, and Chianti wine. We’ll try to cover it slightly differently from others, though I have to admit it’s kinda hard to show places there that are underrated. :)

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If you stand on the Ponte Vecchio and turn your back on Siena, what is in front of you is the Arno going west, and the Arno going west is a river with a job. It worked for Florence for eight hundred years. It carried wool downstream from the city’s mills to the port at Pisa. It carried salt and marble and grain back up. When the Pisans silted up in the fifteenth century, the Medici built a new port at Livorno and cut a canal between the two, and the goods kept moving without the route changing in any meaningful way. The towns the river passes are not the cypress-and-abbey towns. They are the working towns. Pontedera the factory town. San Miniato the road town on the Via Francigena. Pistoia the bakery town that fed the Roman troops on the consular road two thousand years before there was a Florence to feed. Pisa the old port. Livorno the new one. The Renaissance hill country is what Tuscany looked like on a postcard. The Arno corridor is what Tuscany did for a living.

This guide is for the second road.

A note on the geography. I am going to use the Arno corridor loosely, the way the Apuan Alps Guide used the Apuane loosely. The strict corridor is the river itself, from Florence to the mouth between Marina di Pisa and the pine forest at Lecciona. The towns I will include extend a little beyond. Pistoia and Montecatini sit on the Pistoiese plain, north of the river. Bagni di Pisa sits on the slope just north of Pisa. Livorno sits south of the mouth, on the open sea. None of these are strictly on the Arno, but for a traveler driving the road between Florence and the coast, they are one country. The river is the spine, and the rest is what the spine carried or what grew up close enough to be lifted by what the river did.

I will tell you frankly what you are signing up for. The towns are not pretty in the Renaissance hilltop way. Pisa is a working city with the third-most-photographed object in Europe sitting in one corner, and most of the rest is residential apartment blocks, university buildings, and traffic. Pontedera is a factory town and does not pretend otherwise. Livorno is a port city with no time for you in the working sense, because the people who live there are at work. San Miniato has the climb to the top of its hill, one product, and a long view, and outside the November festival weekends, the streets are quiet. Montecatini Terme is a nineteenth-century leisure capital that has lost its leisure class, and walking the place is closer to walking through a museum than through a town. Pistoia is the closest the corridor has to a classic Tuscan piazza, and it is the tier of town nobody puts on an itinerary because Florence is twenty-five minutes away by train.

The trade is this. You give up the photogenic. You get fewer crowds, more of a working life, and a thicker sense of how Italy actually feeds and houses itself. If you need the photogenic, the road south of Florence is still there and will still be beautiful next year. If you want to see the Tuscany that worked, drive west.

TLDR

The river is the spine. Florence to the sea, an hour and ten minutes by train, four hours by the time you stop in three towns along the way. Pisa at the mouth, Florence at the top, six worthwhile stops in between.

The working Tuscany. Factory towns, port cities, road towns, thermal stations. The economy that built Florence, with Florence sitting at the head of the table and everything else doing the actual work.

Less photographed, more lived in. The corridor does not appear on the postcard rack. The squares are smaller, the cafés are working cafés, the restaurants are full of locals at one and empty after three.

The trade-off. You give up the Chianti hills and the abbey light. You get a Vespa museum that turns out to be about a three-wheeled bee, a truffle capital you can visit without the bus, the empty ballroom of the grandest spa in Tuscany, and a fish soup fought over by two harbors. Worth it for the right traveler.

Where to base yourself

Pisa

This will surprise visitors who know Pisa only for the tower, the only image most people carry of the city. The image is misleading. Pisa is a working city with a serious university and a fully functional old center, and it is also, by some distance, the most convenient base on the corridor. The airport is in town. The train station puts you in Florence in fifty minutes and at the coast in fifteen. San Miniato, Pontedera, Lucca, and the spa wing are within forty minutes by road. You can sleep in Pisa, see the tower in the first morning, and spend the rest of the trip going outward in every direction.

The alternative, if your trip is short and you want to be in Florence in the evenings, is to base yourself there and treat the corridor as a series of day trips heading west. This works for two or three days. For anything longer, Florence becomes the obstacle the rest of your day has to recover from, and you will be happier sleeping in Pisa.

The places not to miss

San Miniato. The hill town above the lower Valdarno, halfway between Pisa and Florence, that built its modern identity on the white truffle and runs three weekends of the Mostra Mercato every November. Visit in the off-season for the town itself, the rebuilt Federician tower at the top, the long view down the river, and lunch at Pepenero on the Piazza del Duomo. The Feature is also the publication’s argument about the difference between a festival economy and a Tuesday economy.

Pontedera. A factory town on the Valdera, fifteen minutes from Pisa, which would be on nobody’s itinerary except that the Piaggio museum is here, and the Piaggio museum is the best small industrial museum I have walked into in Italy. Free entry. Two hours if you take it seriously. The Vespa room is the famous one. The Ape room is the actual one. The Moto Guzzi and Aprilia hall is the room you did not expect. The Feature covers the museum as the showroom for a vehicle, the Ape, that the rest of the country is still using.

Montecatini Terme. An hour east of Pisa on the Pistoiese plain. The grandest thermal town in Tuscany and a place where you can stand inside the architecture of nineteenth-century European leisure with no one else in the room. The Tettuccio is the cathedral and it is empty. The Feature is about an era closing while the lights are still on.

Bagni di Pisa. The thermal village just north of Pisa, where the Medici and the Habsburgs took the cure, and where today the cure is a quiet weekday afternoon. Open in winter when the rest of the corridor is shut. The Dispatch is about the Tuesday when nobody else is in the water.

Worth a visit

Pistoia. A small Florence with no Arno and almost no tourists. The Piazza del Duomo is the Romanesque version of Florence’s, the cathedral holds one of the great pieces of medieval European silverwork, and the streets behind it are narrow and stone and quiet on a Saturday. What Pistoia has that no other Tuscan town has is a café tradition closer to Vienna than to Florence. Savory cases. Real sandwiches. The bread doing the work. The Feature also covers the small zoo outside town, which was the reason we went the first time.

Livorno. South of the Arno mouth, the port city the Medici built when Pisa silted up, with no time for the visitor in the working sense, which is exactly why it earns the visit. Fish in the morning at the market. Canals in the old Venetian quarter. The most concentrated seafood meal in Tuscany at lunch. A working harbor in the evening. The Feature is about a city that does not perform for you.

The food only here

Caciucco. The fish soup of the Tyrrhenian coast, fought over between Livorno and Viareggio, written one way by the Livornesi (with five C’s, for five fish) and another way by the Viareggini (with four C’s, for whatever the harbor gave up that morning). A heavy single course, eaten with toasted Tuscan bread and red wine, never ordered inland. The Dispatch covers the dish and the harbor logic underneath it.

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My final note

This is the part of Tuscany that does the working. The road runs from the working city at the top to the working city at the mouth, and the towns along it are working towns of one kind or another. Factory. Road. Bakery. Spa. Port. None of them are the postcard. All of them are part of the answer to the question of how Florence ever became Florence in the first place.

This guide is alive. I update it whenever a new piece on the Arno corridor goes up.

Everything in here is a place I have been to personally. I don’t write about restaurants I haven’t eaten at or towns I haven’t walked through. If a place is in this guide, it’s because I went, ate, learned something, and decided it was worth your time.

Guide last updated: 19 June 2026

This is reversed for the places where you eat. The trattorie and ristoranti and cantine are open exactly when the shops are closed: lunch from one to three or four, then dinner from seven or eight to whenever. The two systems interlock like teeth. Nothing is open all day. You learn to plan around it, or you go hungry, or you stand on the wrong side of a closed door at three-fifteen and wonder what is wrong with this country.

The further south you go, the more rigid the schedule gets. In a Calabrian mountain village at three in the afternoon you could fire a cannon down the main street and hit nothing. In Greece, I once tried to take an elevator at three-thirty, and I am still not sure it was working. In the bigger Italian cities the rules loosen, but the rhythm holds.

There are two exceptions to the riposo. One is McDonald’s, which is American and a franchise, and contractually obliged never to close. We will leave McDonald’s alone.

The other is the bar.

The Italian bar is not a bar. Or it is, but it is also a café, and a breakfast counter, and a lunch spot, and an aperitivo venue, and a dessert place, and a community living room, and the place where two old men play cards every afternoon at four. It is the most flexible institution in the Italian day. While everything else closes, the bar stays open.

You have to understand what this word means before any of it makes sense.

In English, bar is the place you go in the evening to drink, to socialize, and, often enough, to get loudly drunk. In Italian, bar is the place you go in the morning to drink coffee. The drinking-and-getting-drunk part is a small evening note inside a much larger institution that begins at seven in the morning and runs for fifteen hours. Italians, in my four years here, do not really go anywhere to get drunk. They drink, certainly, sometimes a lot, but always inside a meal, or alongside food, or as part of a sequence that ends with espresso and a walk home. The bar is not a drinking establishment. It is a public room.

Most cultures have a version of this. The German Bierhalle, where you sit on a long wooden bench, and the same place serves you a coffee at eleven, a sausage and a beer at two, and a stein at nine. The Austrian Kaffeehaus, the kávézó in Hungarian, where the same room is a writer’s office in the morning, a businessman’s lunch at one, a pensioner’s reading room at four, and a couple’s evening at eight. The British pub, which opens at eleven and feeds you, gives you the football, holds the village quiz on Tuesdays, and pours the last pint at eleven. The American small-town bar that does the same thing on a different scale. The Japanese izakaya, where the same five regulars have been drinking at the same counter for fifteen years, where the cook knows what they want before they ask, and where the food, the sake, and the talk all run together until late.

What all these institutions share, when they work, is roughly five things. They are open all year round, every day, no seasons, no long closures. They flex their service through the day, from breakfast to lunch to afternoon to evening, the same room reshaping itself for each. They serve food, coffee, and alcohol from the same counter, without splitting those functions across separate establishments. They are anchored in a single community, with the same regulars and the same staff for years. And they make their margins on volume, not on premium pricing: a coffee is a euro, a glass of wine is three, lunch is twenty, the aperitivo is six, and nothing is overpriced because the model only works if the same people come back every day.

The European and American versions of this institution tend to hit all five. The Italian bar, the British pub, the German Bierhalle, the Austrian Kaffeehaus, the Hungarian kávézó, the American small-town bar and diner: different in tone, different in what they sell, but all open across the whole day from breakfast onwards, all flexible, all serving the full range, all community-rooted, all priced for daily use. The Asian and Arabic cousins hit four of the five, and which one they miss tells you something about the culture. The Japanese izakaya is essentially a British pub by function, but it opens in the late afternoon and runs into the night, so the morning is missing. The Chinese teahouse keeps the all-day rhythm, serves as a community anchor, and maintains affordability, but does not serve alcohol. The Arabic café, in Cairo or Beirut or Marrakech, does the all-day thing brilliantly, with regulars, shisha, backgammon, and small coffees served until late, but the alcohol is missing there, too. Each one shows you which of the five basics you can drop and still have something useful, and which one is the load-bearing wall.

The Italian bar happens to keep all five at once, from seven in the morning until eleven at night. That is the whole institution.

The word itself is a small piece of misdirection. There are several theories about where it comes from, and the one Italians tell each other is that BAR is an acronym for Banco A Ristoro, the standing-up counter, and that a man called Alessandro Manaresi opened the first one in Florence in 1898. He may have. The cleaner answer is probably that it came from English along with so much else in the late nineteenth century, bar meaning the brass rail at a counter, and Italy adopted the word and bent it to fit its own institution. Either way, by 1900 the older sign reading Caffè was being painted over with Bar, and the bar replaced the café as the lead actor on the Italian street. The actual oldest cafés are still standing. Caffè Florian opened in Venice in 1720, the Pedrocchi in Padua in 1722, the Greco in Rome a few decades later. They are now beautiful museums where a cappuccino costs eight euros. The real life of the bar happened elsewhere, in the smaller rooms, in the working neighborhoods, in the morning rush after the war when the country was rebuilding itself one espresso at a time.

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The clearest way to explain how a bar works is to walk through one. So let me describe ours.

The Margherita is on the piazza in Marina di Pietrasanta where Sophia and I live. It is not a famous place. There is no plaque on the wall. It is just a bar, the way every Italian town has a bar, and it is open three hundred and sixty-five days a year. Renovations happen on a rolling basis: half the room gets new chairs while the other half keeps serving. Christmas, the bar is open. On the fifteenth of August, the bar is open. On the morning Italy plays Argentina in the World Cup, the bar opens at six. It is the most reliable thing in our life here.

Mornings start around seven. The bar at seven is a coffee bar. The cornetti come out of the oven, the espresso machine begins its slow constant hiss, and the people who work at the post office and the farmacia and the school come in for a quick coffee at the counter, un caffè e via, a coffee and gone. The standing-at-the-counter coffee in Italy is its own subject and I will write about it separately, but the short version is that you stand, you drink the coffee in three sips, you say grazie ciao, and you leave. It costs about a euro twenty. If you sit at a table, the same coffee costs three or four euros, sometimes more. This is not a tourist trap. It is the system.

By eight, the morning has settled into a slower rhythm. The retired men have come down for their cappuccino e cornetto, the table closest to the door has been claimed by the same three women who claim it every morning, the dog under their table is asleep on a folded jacket. People who have already had their morning coffee at home come in for a second one, because in Italy you do not have a coffee, you have many. Five a day for the average Italian, four spread through working hours and one after lunch, sometimes a sixth after dinner. The bar at eight in the morning is doing five different things at once. Behind the counter, a man named Luca is moving fast and not appearing to.

By eleven the morning is winding down. The cornetti are gone, the cappuccinos slow, the bar shifts towards its midday face. This is the moment when, somewhere in the world, a tourist orders a cappuccino at quarter past eleven and the barista does not refuse but does, in the small set of his shoulders, register the offense. After eleven, milk in coffee is a foreign drink. Italians switch to caffè macchiato if they want a touch of milk, or to a marocchino in the north if they want something dressier, or to plain espresso which they will drink for the rest of the day. Joe Bastianich, an Italian-American restaurateur, has gone on record arguing that this rule is silly and Italian bars should serve cappuccino at any hour. He is right about the economics and wrong about the culture, and the rule has not moved.

At one o’clock the Margherita transforms. Half the tables are reset for lunch. White napkins go down, cutlery comes out, a small printed menu of about ten dishes appears, and the kitchen, which until now has been making toast and warming pastries, switches into full operation. Two pastas. A fritto misto. A tagliata. A salad or two. Nothing fancy. Everything cooked fresh, made by the same hands that made my coffee at eight, served by the same waiter, drunk with the same house wine that fills the small carafes on every table. Lunch at the Margherita runs about twenty euros for a plate of pasta and a glass of wine. The other half of the tables, the smaller ones near the bar, stay in coffee mode for the people who already ate at home and want to come down for an espresso and a digestivo. Both functions run side by side without colliding. Italian bars are good at this.

By three, the lunch service ends. The kitchen closes for two hours. The bar quiets, the way the whole town quiets, and for a little while the only people in the place are an old man witha newspaper and a couple finishing their second coffee. This is the hinge of the day. The morning is done, the lunch is done, the evening has not yet started. In Versilia the riposo is real but soft. The bar stays open even though the kitchen is closed. You can still get a coffee. You can still get a glass of water. The owner is still behind the counter, doing the books, watching the door.

Then around five-thirty, six o’clock, the bar wakes up again for the aperitivo. This is the central social ritual of Italian evening life and the second thing the bar does that has no real equivalent abroad. Aperitivo is not happy hour. It is not pre-dinner drinks in the American sense. It is a structured hour or two between work and supper in which Italians drink something bitter, eat something salty, and reset. The classic order is a Negroni or a spritz, Aperol or Campari depending on your taste, served in a stemmed glass with a slice of orange, with a small bowl of olives and another of crisps and another of small focaccia squares laid out in front of you. None of this costs much. A spritz with all the snacks is six or seven euros. The point is not to eat dinner off the snacks, though tourists try, and in Milan whole bars have built their economic model around tourists trying. The point is to drink slowly with friends in the hour when the light is good, and then go home and have dinner.

The Margherita does aperitivo the simple way. A bowl of olives, a bowl of crisps, sometimes a small plate of focaccia. People who live in our piazza begin to drift in around six. They claim their tables and stay for two hours. By seven the bar is full. By seven-thirty, on a summer evening, the small tables outside have all been pushed together and there are three generations of one family sitting at them, drinking spritz, talking over each other, and the youngest grandchild is asleep against his grandmother’s arm. This is the bar at its peak.

After eight the bar empties out as people walk home or to a restaurant for dinner. From eight to ten the Margherita is quieter, doing dessert and digestivi for a smaller crowd. People who have eaten at home come down for a limoncello or an amaro. Couples coming back from the passeggiata stop in for one last coffee. Sometimes the bar puts on a small dinner of its own, a few set dishes, and competes for the evening trade with the trattorie on the next street, but most nights it just stays in its lane. By eleven the lights are dimming, the chairs are stacked, Luca is wiping down the counter, and the bar is closing. Tomorrow at seven the cornetti come out of the oven again.

The reason this institution matters is that nothing else in Italian life is this open. The trattoria is open four hours a day and closed on Mondays. The farmacia is closed on Sunday. The post office takes a two-hour lunch. The bar is open every day from seven in the morning until eleven at night, and inside that window it shape-shifts to be whatever the moment needs. It is the place where the town keeps its appointments with itself.

When Howard Schultz, the founder of Starbucks, came to Milan in 1983, this is what he saw and tried to copy. He built one of the largest companies in the world out of his half-misunderstanding of it. The bar is what he was reaching for, and the thing he produced was not the bar. The bar requires that the same five baristas have worked at the Margherita for ten years. It requires that the woman who comes in every morning for her macchiato senza schiuma has been doing this for twenty years and Luca knows her order and pours it before she sits down. It requires a piazza with the same people walking across it every day. It is not a chain. It is the opposite of a chain. It is a single room, in a single town, that has been serving the same neighbourhood for long enough that the neighbourhood considers it part of the architecture.

If you visit Italy and want to understand the country in one sitting, do this. Pick a small town. Pick the busiest bar on the main square. Sit at a table outside, order a coffee in the morning and a spritz in the evening, and stay for two hours each time. Watch who walks in. Watch who is greeted by name. Watch the rhythm of the place across the riposo. You will see the whole town’s social structure in one room: the postman at eight, the mothers at ten, the tradesmen at lunch, the retirees at four, the families at six, the couples at nine. The bar is the town’s central nervous system, and unlike the trattoria or the farmacia or the church, it never closes its doors.

Marble in the counter, brass on the rail, an espresso machine that has been there since 1978, and a sign above the door that says Bar.

That is the institution.

I will tell you now that I do not like truffle. Any of it. White, black, shaved, infused, it doesn’t matter. It belongs to that small family of foods built almost entirely out of one insistent smell, like very old cheese, which I also leave on the plate. I will eat anchovies until someone takes the tin away. I love Gentleman’s Relish, I love everything that comes out of cold water and tastes of the bottom of it. But truffle does nothing for me except announce itself. Sophia is the opposite. She loves the stuff so completely that there is truffle salt in our kitchen, a small, obscene jar of it, and she will tell you, because I cannot, that the white one is more pungent, closer to garlic, better raw, while the black holds up to heat and wants to be cooked into something. I take her word for all of it. I came to the truffle capital of Italy as a man who cannot taste the thing the capital is built on, which turns out to be a useful position from which to watch.

Because San Miniato is built on it, and you understand this inside five minutes of reaching the top. We came in winter, deliberately after the festival rather than during, because we don’t like crowds and we reasoned the prices in the shops would settle once the November weekends were over, and the buses stopped running. The town runs three weekends of the Mostra Mercato Nazionale del Tartufo Bianco every November, fifty-some years deep now, and during those weekends you cannot even drive up: they close the hill and put you on a shuttle from the bottom, which tells you everything about the scale of the thing. We had missed all that. And still, walking the spine of the centro storico past the Duomo and into the small squares, the entire place announced one product. Truffle in the windows, truffle on the chalkboards, truffle in the names of shops, the whole borgo organized like a reliquary around a smell I can’t stand.

I want to be careful here, because the easy move is contempt, and contempt would be wrong. There is nothing dishonest about a town leaning on its one thing. This is simply how towns survive, in Italy and everywhere else. Strip San Miniato of the truffle and you have a genuinely good Tuscan town, walkable, set on its hills, sitting somewhere above a small borgo and well below a finished city like Siena, worth an afternoon and a long lunch with the countryside laid out below you. But every town needs its thing or it disappears into the general green pleasantness of the region, becomes one more place you drive through on the way to a place you’ve heard of. The truffle is San Miniato’s answer to that problem. The town found the one card it could not be beaten on, and it has played that card for a century.

And it is a strong card. The white truffle, Tuber magnatum, is genuinely rare in a way that almost nothing else in the food world still manages to be. It cannot be farmed. People have tried for decades, and it refuses, growing only where it decides to grow, in a narrow band of calcareous Italian hillside, found by men who walk the woods at night with trained dogs and tell no one their spots. The black truffle is hard enough, hand-dug, a craft of its own, and grows across Umbria and Lazio and Abruzzo and can at least be coaxed into a managed orchard. The white one will not be coaxed. So the scarcity is real, not invented, and the price follows: a kilo of white truffle moves between fifteen hundred and five thousand euros depending on the year and the size of the lump, and in a thin season it has cleared six thousand. When a restaurant shaves truffle over your pasta with great ceremony, that’s almost always the black. The white is the one you read about and rarely eat.

San Miniato’s claim to it is old and a little improbable, and the town keeps a monument to the most improbable part: in 1954 a hunter named Arturo Gallerini, known to everyone as Bego, went into the woods at Balconevisi just outside town with his dog Parigi and pulled out a single white truffle weighing over two and a half kilos. They sent it to Dwight Eisenhower. There is now an ironwork statue of the man and the dog standing in town, the two of them cast in metal forever on the strength of one absurd lucky night in the trees, and I stood in front of it for a while thinking that this is exactly how a place becomes what it is. Not by plan. By one accident large enough to build a story on, and then a century of people agreeing to keep telling it.

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We had lunch at Pepenero, on the Piazza del Duomo, the kind of place that sits a notch above a trattoria without quite tipping into ceremony. The room opens onto a terrace, and the terrace overlooks the whole valley, and we took a table where Sophia could look at Tuscany, and I could look at Sophia looking at it. We ate the truffle, of course (at least she did). Bottoni, the pasta named for buttons, little stuffed coins of pasta with meat and tomato inside and the truffle grated over the top in front of us. Sophia went quiet the way she does when something is very good. We bought a few jars of truffle things on the way out (obviously), the way you do, the way everyone does, the small purchase that lets you carry the day home with you.

And then time passed, which is the part the town doesn’t tell you about, because the town only sees you on the day. The jars sat in the cupboard. We are not people who keep proper white truffle at home; almost nobody is. But we do buy black truffle now and then, and we don’t buy it on a hill behind a closed road. We buy it from a man named Marco who runs a food truck in a supermarket parking lot down on the Marina near us. He digs some of it himself and sells the rest for the farmers around him, and there is no shuttle bus. We go to truffle festivals too, but not that one. We go to the small ones, up in the mountain villages, and a truffle festival up there is two or four tables in a piazza, maybe a nonna with a folding chair and some jars, somebody selling porcini alongside. The buyers are not wealthy. The buyers are Giovanni from the next village over, who likes truffles when they're in season and can afford a little. There is no event. There is no Instagram. Often there is no announcement at all, just talk in the bar that something will happen at the end of the month, a weekend, nobody quite sure which day or what time, only that it will happen here, and then Marco or whoever sets a table in the square with ten truffles and maybe a price written on a scrap of paper. And because it works this way, with no buses and no closed roads and no festival to feed, it is also far cheaper.

This is the difference I kept turning over in my head on the drive home, and it has almost nothing to do with mushrooms. San Miniato sells you the truffle as an occasion. The mountain village hands it to you as a Tuesday. One has built a hundred-year machine around the smell and runs the buses to prove it; the other doesn’t bother to tell you it’s open. Both are real. The festival truffle is the same fungus as the parking-lot truffle. But the festival has to charge you for the festival, and the village charges you for the truffle, and somewhere in that gap is everything I think about when I think about why we left the wheel and came to live in a place like this.

I never did taste it. We drove down off the hill in the last of the light, the rebuilt tower going dark behind us, Sophia smelling faintly of garlic and pleased with the world, the jars rattling in the bag at her feet.

Pontedera, the town, we knew nothing about. The brain-dump version, which I will give you now and defend in a moment, is that Pontedera is a working factory town in the Valdera, and we have nothing in particular to say about it. Yes, there is a piazza, with a church, and some restaurants around it in an old town. But that is true to almost all Italian towns. We were there for the museum. The museum is the reason to go. The museum, it turns out, is also not the museum we thought we were going to see.

The Museo Piaggio sits on the edge of the Piaggio factory, in a long, low brick building called the ex-officina attrezzeria, the old tool shop, which is the oldest building of the industrial complex Piaggio raised around itself starting in the 1920s. The factory is still working, sort of. Nowadays, it is spread across continents, of course, but as far as I know, some manufacturing is still going on here.

For the museum, entry is free. There is a donation box near the door, and the staff who run the place are good enough at their jobs that you will want to drop something in it on the way out. Drop something in it on the way out. Please.

The museum has three rooms, or really three parts. The Vespa room is the famous one. It is the room every visitor walks into first, and, in its own right, it is well done. From the 1944 prototype called the Paperino, the rejected first attempt, to the MP6. From there to the 1946 Vespa 98, the first production model, to the GS 150 of the mid-1950s that is, by quiet agreement among people who think about such things, the most beautiful scooter ever made. The Vespa Siluro, the torpedo, built for speed records, looking like a dragster on two wheels. The Vespa Alpha, amphibious, built to look like a vehicle James Bond would steal in 1965. A hundred small variations of the same wasp shape, each one a small adjustment to a 1946 design that has barely needed changing in eighty years.

The Vespa room is also where the museum stops being about the brand and starts being about the people who did things with the brand, which is the part of it I liked most. One wall has a long display of the world travelers who, over the last eight decades, have ridden a single Vespa around the globe. The photographs are uniformly excellent and uniformly improbable. A man in 1962 who rode his Vespa from Milan to Tokyo with everything he owned strapped to the back of it. A couple in the 1970s who rode two of them from Italy to South America via Africa. A small wall of recent ones, where the Vespa is the same as it was and only the photographers have got better. None of these people were paid by Piaggio. They just decided one morning to do the thing and then they did it.

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Around the corner is a small, darkened room with a video library of every film and music clip the curators could find featuring a Vespa. Roman Holiday is the famous one, the Audrey Hepburn sequence everyone has seen. Quadrophenia is the other famous one. Around them are forty other clips you would not have known to look for. The Vespa appearing in 1960s French and Brazilian films. The Vespa in 1980s music videos.

The Vespa in animation, the Vespa in commercials shot in countries that never had Vespas until the commercial said they should. You sit on the bench in the dark room for fifteen minutes longer than you meant to. The clip you eventually leave on is the one where someone in a city you have never been to is riding a Vespa down a street you have never seen, doing something the Vespa is now doing in a place the Vespa was not designed for, and the design from 1946 is holding up exactly as well there as it does in Pontedera.

The room I will defend as the actual reason to come here is the Ape room. The Ape is the three-wheeled utility vehicle Piaggio designed in 1948, two years after the Vespa, on the same logic: cheap, small, functional, designed for the narrow streets of an Italian borgo that no normal truck could turn around in. The Italian word ape means bee. Vespa is wasp, Ape is bee. The naming is consistent. The bee carries things. The wasp does not.

The Ape room is full of them, in all of their variations. Open-bed Apes for hauling vegetables to market. Closed-cab Apes for delivery. Apes converted into street-food vans, into mobile flower stalls, into small fire engines, into one I think was a postal van and another that may have been a 1950s ambulance. They are tiny. They have one cylinder. They smell. They go thirty kilometers an hour on a good road. They have made it possible for an entire layer of the Italian economy to function for almost eighty years inside the medieval-street footprint that Italy built itself on top of.

I had been to Japan once, a few years before we got to Pontedera, and the thing that struck me there was the kei car, the small narrow car built specifically for narrow Japanese streets and the high cost of urban land. The kei car is what Japan invented when it needed to move people and goods through cities with no room for normal vehicles. The Ape is what Italy invented for the same reason, twenty years earlier, for streets that were even older and even narrower. The two countries arrived at the same answer from different histories. Same logic, different machines. The Ape room is the room where you understand this without anyone having to explain it to you. You walk past forty small functional three-wheeled vehicles and the argument arrives on its own.

The argument also comes up every time we drive through any village inland from where we live. Apes are not historical objects. Apes are still working. The further you get from the coast and the closer you get to the older Italy, the more Apes you see. A pale-blue Ape pulled over at the side of a road outside Camaiore last spring with two old men sitting on the back step eating sandwiches. A mustard-yellow Ape with a wooden side panel in a borgo in the Lunigiana, loaded with chestnuts in October. A bottle-green Ape full of olive crates outside a mill in the hills above Lucca in November. Apes parked in the side streets of every village in the country, with the engine running and the driver inside the alimentari, picking up something for lunch. We have seen, by my rough count over the last four years, several hundred Apes still in active service in the part of Tuscany where we live. The deeper inland you go and the more medieval the village, the more Apes there are. The Ape was designed for the medieval Italian street, and the medieval Italian street still exists, so the Ape still exists, and the museum room in Pontedera is therefore not a historical exhibition at all. It is the showroom for a vehicle that the rest of the country is still using.

The third room is the one that surprised me most and which I had not expected, because the gap between what Piaggio publicly is and what Piaggio actually owns is wider than a visitor walking past the factory would guess. Piaggio also owns Moto Guzzi, the historic motorcycle manufacturer from the shores of Lake Como, in business since 1921. Piaggio also owns Aprilia, the racing brand that has been winning Superbike titles for thirty years. Piaggio also owns Gilera. The four brands together have, according to the small plaque I read three times to be sure I had the number right, won 104 world titles across the racing disciplines they compete in. The room is a long hall of motorcycles from those collections. Wartime racing bikes from the 1940s. The 1990s Aprilia superbikes from when superbike racing was a working sport rather than the marginal one it has become. The 1970s Moto Guzzi tourers that look, sitting still, like they are going somewhere serious.

I do not, normally, like motorcycles. They feel unsafe to me. I am the kind of person who likes cars more. I left the racing room, considering whether to buy a motorbike in Italy, because the small streets, narrow lanes, and short distances in our part of the country make the case for one stronger than anywhere else I have lived. The thought left me by the next morning. The point is that the room was good enough to put the thought in my head.

Outside the museum, in the courtyard, are two more pieces that visitors walk past and probably ignore. One is a small early-1950s propeller-driven airplane called the Piaggino. The other is a railway locomotive in the colors of the Ferrovie Calabro-Lucane, a small private railway in southern Italy that Piaggio supplied with rolling stock in the 1920s. The two pieces together are the part of the museum that tells you that Piaggio was an aircraft and railway manufacturer for 50 years before becoming a scooter manufacturer, and that the Vespa is the youngest thing in the company’s portfolio. The factory across the courtyard, the one currently making three thousand people work reduced hours, was a bomber factory in the war that came before the war that gave us the Vespa. The history beneath this museum is older, and stranger than the famous room suggests.

The whole museum is two hours if you take it seriously. Free entry. Fifteen minutes from Pisa. On the corridor between Pisa and Florence for anyone driving the road.

Mama, papa, two kids, sitting at the café across from where we were having a post-midday cappuccino (I know, sacrilege!). They ordered lunch, which hasn’t arrived yet. Normally, anyone else would be talking to each other. Well, not them. They were looking at their phones, all on their own, not even looking up. Then food came, so they were forced to look up and put down their phones. Oh, sorry, no, obviously, they had to take a picture of their pasta, then pose for a cheerful selfie, holding their spritz and soda. Like if they are having the time of their lives. They ate their food; one of them commented, “Oh, it’s good.” That was all the talk. Then they went back to their phones, paid, then walked away. The kids were still swiping while walking.

It’s an unimaginably sad scene, to be honest. And it’s every day during this summer, here in Pietrasanta. I don’t see this scene off-season. You can tell who’s not local by many tell-tale signs. Looking at you, Mr. White Socks With New Balance Shoes, Logo T-Shirt, Khaki Shorts. But the best way to tell? The ones who are glued to their phones while they are sitting in a beautiful piazza by the sea. They are not even documenting every second of their time, like if content creation would be mandatory, or their content would be unique in any way (it’s not). They are just swiping, like gambling addicts.

Meanwhile, Italians are conversing loudly, speaking to each other, arguing 10 minutes about which red wine they should order, and almost no one is checking their phones. To be honest, there are not even out, no phones on the table, no one is holding it like their wallets. It’s somewhere in their bags, pockets, or else. Hidden. Unscrollable.

I moved here from a country glued to screens, and the contrast was one of the first thing I noticed, sometime in my first week, and it has not stopped being one of the things I love most about living in Italy. The piazzas are loud. People shout across them. Teenagers walk in groups, dressed up, talking over each other, almost none of them holding a phone. On the subway in Rome, on the tram in Torino, in the bar of my own small town in Versilia, the default position of the human face is pointed at another human face, not at a screen. I have lived in three Italian cities of three different sizes, and the rule has held in all of them. In Italy, almost universally, people don’t care about digital.

This “fact” has some side effects. The reason Italy looks this way is not that Italians are spiritually purer than the rest of us. It is that the country never finished digitalizing. Banking apps are a joke. Government portals require you to collect 10 pages of paper from 5 different sources, sign it, and walk it into an office where someone will re-enter the same data into a computer. Websites for half the businesses I deal with look like they were last updated in 2002 and built pre-dotcom bubble. If you want to book something, you call. At best, text. There are some exceptions, of course, but universally, I can safely say this: compared to countries like the US or UK, Italy is decades behind in digital infrastructure.

To be honest, it has some challenges if you live here, but the overall feeling is that, at least for me, this is the best place to be when the entire world is going fully digital and less human.

And let’s not pretend. All the modern amenities you actually use arrived here in the 80s and 90s and stopped arriving after that. The autostrada, the supermarket, the espresso machine in every bar, the small-engine car that fits down a medieval street, the regional train that mostly runs. Italy got those. And we also have parking, delivery, and taxi apps (most of them work), Amazon, and the net bandwidth is also manageable in most places, everywhere else, you get sat-net. The other elements? The living your life on social media? The angst on world news? The forever disruption, the grind, the endless work hours, and the rat-wheel like life? They are here too, but 10x less than elsewhere, I’m sure.

Here, life is not centered on connection but on participation.

The result is that an Italian piazza in 2026 feels closer to a piazza in 1992 than to one in any major capital outside Italy, with the benches full, the conversations loud, and the phones still tucked into pockets where they belong. If you have any kind of nostalgia towards the 80s and the 90s, like me, since I was born in 82, I can tell you, franky: not all is lost. It’s just hidden, mostly in places like Italy, where slow living is not a framed print in your study above your 27” screen, but a Tuesday.

With Sophia, we have a saying. The world is heading for total idiocracy through screens and isolation, and if there is one country that falls last, one country that holds out longest against the algorithm telling everyone what to think and where to look, it will be the one that never managed to install the algorithm properly in the first place. A country that could not be bothered with how many likes you have on your last Instagram post.

I hope they hold the line.

Peter

Pietrasanta, 14 June 2026

What’s new on our site: more love letters to port towns

I think it’s kinda an obsession at this point for me, but I continued my love letters on Italian port towns. First, it was Livorno. Now I went full love story with Genova. It’s rough, it’s harsh, it’s loud, it’s beautiful.

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We had been told not to come. Our friends in Verona had said don’t. Our Tuscan friends had said don’t, some of them with a shrug, which I have learned in Italy is the difference between a warning and an opinion. The reputation was specific and consistent. Genova was rough. Genova was not safe. The carruggi, the old alleys of the historic core, had been full of dealers and street workers a few years ago, which in Italian conversation amounts to the same thing as last week. The port was poor in the run-down sense, not the romantic sense. There was nothing to see. Even the international flights skipped the Cristoforo Colombo airport in favor of Milan, Florence, Pisa, or Nice across the border, which was why we had never met a tourist who had been to Genova on purpose. The city was, in the small Italian consensus of our friends, the place you went to take a ferry from, the way Livorno was the place you went to take a ferry from, except Livorno at least had a love story and Genova did not.

This is the part that surprised me. The same friends will tell you the same thing about Naples. Naples is rough, they say, Naples is hard, Naples is unfiltered, but Naples has style, Naples has charm, you can fall in love with Naples in three days, you should go, be careful. Genova does not get that exemption. Genova gets the warning without the love letter. After the third or fourth time we heard this, Sophia and I stopped asking and got curious.

The city was two hours from where we live in Pietrasanta, just past the line where we draw the day trip, and the way to settle it was to sleep there. So we did. A week, two Airbnbs, one slow change of neighborhood in the middle, both of them above the port, in the dense old city our friends had named with such specific concern. God, it was such a good decision not to skip, we have been returning ever since.

The carruggi are the part you have to start with, because nothing else in Italy looks like them. Most of them are in the Maddalena area. The streets are stone canyons. They are wide enough for one of the small three-wheeled vans the Italians use to move heavy things through places cars cannot fit, and not always wide enough for that. The buildings on either side are six and seven stories tall, leaning very slightly toward each other above your head, so the strip of sky you can see while looking up is the thickness of a finger. The light at street level is dim even at noon. Laundry hangs on lines strung between windows on opposite buildings, four stories up. The doors at street level are small and low. There is a smell of focaccia coming out of a bakery here, a salumi shop window there, a kebab place in the next alley, an Indian restaurant in the alley after that, a corner shrine to the Madonna with an electric candle still burning in front of a faded fresco. The Genovese walk through all of it without slowing down, in the practiced manner of people who live in a labyrinth.

The closest thing I have ever seen to this is the Spanish Quarter in Naples, which is calmer. The next closest is the medina of a Moroccan town I once spent a long week in, and it was surprisingly cleaner. The carruggi are rougher than either, and at the same time they are the densest medieval city center in Europe, with more than a hundred hectares of essentially intact fourteenth-century street layout, the kind of urban fabric that survives only in places where no one ever got rich enough at the right moment to tear it down for boulevards. Paris did that in the nineteenth century. Florence did it earlier. Rome has been doing it for two thousand years and is still at it. Genova did not. The money in Genova, when it came, did not go into knocking the medieval city down to make wider streets for the carriages of the new merchants. It went somewhere else. Where it went is the surprise.

If you climb out of the carruggi toward the north, you arrive in three or four minutes at a wide, paved walking street called Via Garibaldi, and you have stepped into a different city. Via Garibaldi is the showpiece street of the patrician families of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Four-story Renaissance and Baroque palazzi line both sides of it. The facades are clean. The interiors hold collections by Van Dyck, Rubens, and Caravaggio. The street was deliberately built in the 1550s as the new address for the families who had grown too important for the carruggi, the Spinola and the Doria and the Pallavicini and the rest, and they put up palaces there as fast as they could afford them, which was very fast, because the Republic of Genova at that exact moment was the bank of the Spanish Empire and the money was coming in from the New World every week.

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What they did with the palaces is the part I find astonishing. The Republic of Genova did not believe in spending public money on hosting visiting dignitaries. So it made a list, called a rollo, of the families whose palaces were grand enough to host a head of state. When a foreign ambassador, prince, cardinal, or king arrived in the city, a public lottery was drawn, and the winning family got the honor and the bill. Their palace became, for the duration of the state visit, the official lodging of the Republic. The state showed off, the family paid for it. The system ran until Napoleon ended the Republic in 1797. The forty-two palaces still standing along Via Garibaldi and a few neighboring streets are now a UNESCO site, and most of them are open as museums or used as banks and government offices, which is what happens to private hospitality when the private parties stop being able to afford it.

The lesson of Via Garibaldi is the same lesson you read in the carruggi one street below. The Genovese, then and now, do not waste money. They have a reputation in Italy as the most careful spenders, which the rest of the country puts less politely. They prefer to call themselves prudent. Either way, the city has built its entire history on commercial arithmetic, and if you look up at certain facades along Via Balbi you will notice something that took me three days to register: many of the windows are painted on. A 1700s tax was assessed by the number of windows on a building. The Genovese painted false ones over the bricked-up real ones. The same impulse that built the Rolli system also painted the windows shut.

The food works the same way, because it was originally invented by people who did not waste anything. Pesto is what you make when you have basil, garlic, and pine nuts, and you need to put them on something cheap. Focaccia is what you bake when you have flour, oil, and salt, and you need to feed people in the morning. Farinata is a chickpea-flour pancake you eat standing up at the counter of a small shop, for almost no money, that has been the worker’s lunch in this city for centuries. The seafood is what you cook when the port is fifty meters from your kitchen door, the fish was alive an hour ago, and there is too much of it. The salumi are made out of the parts no one else wanted. The bread takes the oil that the bread alone could not justify. We ate all of it, every day for a week, in the small places in the carruggi that the Genovese eat in too, where the focaccia gets dunked into the bitter espresso at the bar in the morning in a movement that startles you the first time you see it, and where the bowl of pesto pasta arrives without anyone asking what you would like to drink, because in this city there is only one answer to that.

And then we ate the rest of it. The carruggi are the only place in Italy I know of where you can also eat good Turkish, Lebanese, Indian, North African, Chinese, and Japanese food, made by people who were not born in Italy and who came here because Genova has always been what Genova still is, which is a port. The kebab in a small place in the carruggi is the best kebab I have eaten outside Turkey. The ramen we ate one evening in the old city is the best ramen I have eaten outside Tokyo. The cocktail bars in the carruggi are better than the cocktail bars in London, which is heresy to say, but I have tried both. Genova has small jazz speakeasies whose doors carry no signs, full of Genovese sitting and talking dialect to each other, with kitchens turning out a handful of small plates each night. We came back to Genova twice during that first year mainly to eat in places like these, which is not what you expect to say about an Italian city, and which is precisely the thing.

There is a third Genova above all this, which is the wealthy residential city that runs east from the old center along the Corso Italia and up the hills toward Albaro. The streets there are wide. The buildings are five- and six-story, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century, plain enough on the facade but evidently expensive on the inside. The neighborhoods are clean, organized, within walking distance of anything that matters, and they are where I would live if I lived in Genova, although I will not, for the same reasons I would not live in Livorno, which we have already written about. Beyond this third city is a fourth, which is Nervi, ten kilometers east of the center, a former fishing village swallowed by the municipality, looking on the surface like every other beautiful Ligurian seaside town we have driven through: painted houses, dramatic hills above the water, a small port, a seaside promenade that is one of the most loved walks in Liguria. Nervi is administratively part of Genova. The Genovese go there for a slow Sunday and call it leaving town, which it isn’t.

So this is what I have come to believe after a week of walking the city and four returns since. The Mediterranean has, at most, ten port cities of any real significance, and they belong to one another more than they belong to the countries they happen to sit in. Marseille and Naples and Genova and Trieste and Valencia and Algiers and Beirut have more in common with each other, structurally and socially, than any of them has with the inland capital of its own nation. The class split is the same. The dense old quarter is the same. The wealth on the hills is the same. The working port at the bottom is the same. The food invented by poor people that is now famous is the same. The number of people who arrived from elsewhere for work and never left is the same.

What makes Genova singular in this category is that it is the most undisguised of the Italian examples. Naples got grandfathered into the national myth. The country needed Sophia Loren and the bay and pizza, and so the rough parts of Naples became part of the brand, the love letter the country told itself about its own south. Trieste sits on the Slovenian border with an Austrian past, mostly read as a literary city rather than a port. Livorno is the small port that Tuscany prefers to think of as something else. Genova was never folded into the brochure. The Italians who tell you not to come are pointing at the place that does not fit the national-myth project, and they are right that it does not fit, and they are wrong that this is a reason not to come. It is the reason to come.

Genova is the only city in Italy where you can step out of Italy without leaving Italy. The carruggi do not look like Italy. They look like a Mediterranean port city in 1380. The food is Italian, but you can also get a kebab. The wealth lives on the hills. The poor live in the carruggi, where they have lived since the city was founded, except now they are also Turkish, Chinese, and Indian, and have brought their kitchens with them. You sit in a cocktail bar in a four-meter-wide alley in the old city. You walk five minutes uphill, and you are inside a Rubens. You walk five minutes downhill, and you are inside a container port.

We will keep coming back. Mostly for the kebab, to be honest.

This is, in compressed form, the working principle of the Italian food-shopping system. The shops are organized around the food, not around the customer. The food arrives when it arrives, from where it was caught, grown, or made, and the shop opens at the hour when the food makes sense.

Travel writing about Italian food shops tends to treat them as relics, small survivors of a supermarket era that almost erased them, written about in the affectionate tone the genre reserves for narrow streets and Vespas. The framing is wrong. The Italian food shops are not relics. They are the working machinery of a food-distribution system that runs from the producer to the plate in a way no other country in Europe still bothers with at this scale, and the supermarket is not the apex predator that has cornered the rest of them. The supermarket is the floor of the system, a tier that absorbs what smaller shops cannot and that itself operates closer to the producer than the supermarkets you may know elsewhere. The whole structure is organized around one principle. The food is local. Local is the default at every tier. The shops are eight versions of asking how local, with two more tiers, the mobile and the producer-direct, above them all.

This piece teaches the system, tier by tier.

The Supermarket Floor

The Italian supermarket is the floor of the system, and the floor is already high. Three chains carry most of the country. Coop is technically a consumer cooperative, the largest in Italy, and its branding still carries the slightly socialist DNA of its origins. A Coop store feels like the local supermarket of a town that knows it is the local supermarket. Conad is the close competitor, slightly more commercial, slightly broader in reach, structurally similar. Either of them is what an Italian uses when they need to shop a full week’s groceries and the specialty shops are closed or out of reach. Both are stocked, by default, with Italian-sourced products. The vegetables are seasonal more than they aren’t. The cheeses are domestic. The pasta is the same hundred shapes you would expect, made by Italian companies. The wine section runs to two full aisles, and there is a vintage to suit every budget.

Esselunga is the upmarket tier; a supermarket, in the way an English Waitrose or a French Monoprix is. The produce is reliably fresh, the fish counter is a real fish counter, the butcher counter has a person with a knife and the willingness to use it on whatever cut you ask for, and the bread is baked on the premises. If you came to Italy and you only ever shopped at Esselunga, you would still eat better than most food shoppers in Western Europe or in the US. Especially in the US...

The argument for the specialty shops is therefore not that the supermarket is bad. The argument is that the specialty shops are doing something the supermarket structurally cannot, which is being smaller, more local, and more bound to the producer who delivered the food that morning. The specialty shops are how the system dials local up from default to deliberate.

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The Eight Specialty Shops

There are eight food shops worth knowing. Some you find in any Italian town. Others appear only in towns with the right harbor, the right hills, or the right amount of foot traffic to keep them in business. Knowing what each one is for is the difference between shopping in Italy and shopping at Italy.

Alimentari is the small all-purpose food shop. It is not a supermarket. It is the neighborhood shop that carries the things you need for day-to-day kitchen use: dried pasta, a wheel of cheese, some salumi behind the counter, bread, eggs, a small selection of fruit and vegetables, oil, vinegar, salt, coffee. The stock varies wildly between alimentari, depending on what the owner cares about. Some carry an excellent regional wine corner. Some have a tiny fresh-pasta case. Some have nothing but dry goods. The alimentari fills the gap between the supermarket trip and the daily run, and in smaller towns where there is no supermarket within reach, it is the supermarket: older, smaller, more idiosyncratic, run by the family that has run it for two or three generations.

Macelleria is the butcher, and this is the most important specialty shop to learn, because the gap between macelleria meat and supermarket meat is the widest gap in the entire system. The butcher in our part of Versilia buys from local farmers and from hunters back from the woods. In the autumn, the case fills with cinghiale, the wild boar that is the Tuscan game meat the rest of the country recognizes as Tuscan, with the occasional wild hare, and with whatever bird the hunters have brought down that week. Year-round, Chianina beef is raised on local farms, dry-aged in the back room, and sliced for the bistecca. The salumi are local, and the butcher will gladly tell you who made them, where, and on which farm. Esselunga carries decent cuts. The macelleria carries the real article. Most of the macelleria sell wine on the spot as well, usually red, which is best for meat.

Pescheria is the fishmonger. It exists in coastal Italy as the working partner of the local fishing fleet, and inland as a smaller, slightly more limited version that gets its product trucked up overnight. The pescheria operates on the rhythm of the boats. On Sundays the boats do not go out, which means Mondays are bad for fish, which means most pescherie are closed on Mondays. The window for the morning catch is small. By two in the afternoon the day’s best has been bought and the case looks thin. The rule, for the visitor, is straightforward. Arrive before noon. Ask what came in this morning. Let the fishmonger talk you into something you weren’t planning to buy. The thing you weren’t planning to buy will be the best thing on the counter, because it is the thing the fishmonger personally hand-selected from the boat when it docked at six.

Salumeria is the cured meats and cheeses shop. Prosciutto crudo, sopressata, mortadella, salami of fifteen different geographical denominations, and the cheeses, including Parmigiano of different ages, Pecorino of different ages, the soft fresh cheeses of the region, the local hard wheels. The salumeria is what you go to when you are putting together a board for friends, when you need a cheese for the after-dinner course, when you want to take something to a friend’s house and not look like a tourist about it. The ordering etiquette is its own small ritual, and once you have it down, the salumeria becomes the single most rewarding shop in the whole system. Many salumerie now double as a small alimentari, with dry goods on a side shelf and a wine corner along one wall. They also sell full products, salads, and anything that can be put in a small plastic container for takeaway.

Forno is the bread shop. The word forno literally means oven. The older names panificio and panetteria are roughly equivalent. Panificio leans toward the artisan operation that bakes its own bread on-site, panetteria toward the shop that sells bread baked elsewhere or by a partner baker, and forneria is the slightly older Tuscan variant, largely interchangeable with forno. The naming doesn’t matter much, but what matters is that all of them are local. The bread of the forno reflects the bread tradition of the town it sits in, and the bread tradition of an Italian town changes every fifty kilometers. In Liguria, the forno is essentially a focaccia shop with bread on the side. In Tuscany, the forno bakes the unsalted Tuscan bread that is famously divisive, and which the locals will tell you was developed in the Middle Ages in response to a salt tax everyone has since forgotten. In Puglia the forno makes the dense Altamura sourdough that holds together for a week. Each region’s forno is a small geographic statement. You walk in, you ask for the local thing, and you eat what the town has been eating for some hundreds of years.

Pasticceria is the sweet shop, the place for pastries, cakes, biscotti, and, in many cases, an espresso bar at the front, with the cases running down the side. The pasticceria is the breakfast destination for an Italian, un caffè e una pasta at seven-thirty, standing at the bar, on the way to work. It is also the gift destination for any social call: a small box tied with a ribbon of local biscotti or pastries. Like the forno, the pasticceria is regional. The pasticceria in Sicily will sell you cannoli and cassata. The pasticceria in Tuscany will sell you cantucci and ricciarelli. The pasticceria in Naples will sell you the sfogliatella that does not properly exist outside Naples. The pattern repeats. Our small town pasticceria also carries high-priced drinks, like whisky, which they wrap as a gift for you.

Pastificio is the fresh-pasta shop, and this is the one most travelers have never heard of. The pastificio makes the fresh pasta of the town, the ravioli, the tortellini, the local stuffed pasta, and sells it by weight along with the sauces that go with it. Twenty euros at our local pastificio in Versilia buys roughly two large bags of fresh pasta, which is enough for the better part of a week of dinners for two. Our local pastificio runs through the Versilia repertoire by the week: tordelli, the half-moon meat-stuffed pasta that is the Versilia and Lucca holiday dish, fish-filled ravioli that only makes sense on a coast that catches its own fish daily, the local pesto when the basil is right and the rougher meat ragù when it isn’t. In Liguria the pastificio repertoire shifts to Genovese pesto and the trofie that go with it. In Puglia the pastificio is the place for orecchiette and for the cream-of-tomato sauce called pesto rosso. The pasta you buy at the pastificio is alive in a way that supermarket dry pasta is not, cooks in five minutes from refrigerated, and is the dinner Italians serve other Italians on a Tuesday because they were busy. You might wonder why bother with fresh pasta when you have dried one? This is true for spaghetti, tagliatelle, or any packaged pasta, provided you buy a good brand. But buying pre-made stuffed pasta of any kind is a culinary sacrilege.

Fruttivendolo is the greengrocer, the shop or open-front stand for fruit and vegetables. It is seasonal by default in a way the supermarket cannot afford to be. In June you get the strawberries and the early tomatoes. In late October, the first porcini and the first damp-soiled walnuts of the autumn. The fruttivendolo runs on what the local farmers have brought in that morning, and the price reflects the proximity. The fruttivendolo will tell you which producer grew the lemons. The fruttivendolo will also, if you ask, tell you what to do with the artichokes you have just bought, and the answer will be honest because the fruttivendolo’s wife, sister, or mother cooks them the same way.

The Mobile Tier

These eight shops are the fixed tier. Yes, there are others too: wine shops selling local wine, or herbalista, the natural-remedies shop with local spices and herbs. But above all of them, where the geography or the population does not support a fixed shop, is the mobile tier.

The mobile tier is the Italian solution to a small town that cannot sustain a full pescheria, or to a mountain borgo of one hundred people that cannot keep a salumeria in business. The shop comes to you. The Tuesday Ape Piaggio van at our gravel turnout is one version. The food-truck salumeria that drives into a mountain village in the Lunigiana on a Friday morning and parks in the square is another. The bread van that does a loop of three hill villages above Bagni di Lucca on Mondays and Thursdays is another. The pattern is the same. The shop opens for two hours. The locals know the hours. The shopkeeper closes up and drives to the next village. The next village’s two hours start an hour later.

The Producer-Direct Tier

The tier above the mobile is the producer-direct tier, the cheapest and most local of all, and it is invisible to anyone without a phone number.

The first time we encountered this version of the system was at a small farm in the hills above Marina di Pietrasanta. During Halloween, one of the farmers transformed their yard into a Ghostbusters movie set. Yes. They even transformed their old FIAT into the Ghostbusters car. We saw it on Instagram and went in to visit. The event was free, fun, and creative. Ultimately, the goal was to meet with the farmers. We bought their local produce, exchanged phone numbers, and from there on, whatever is in season, we text, or they text, and a big basket of fresh veggies arrives at our door. You can select or define from limited availability, but it will be guaranteed the freshest and cheapest option you can get, farm-to-table in essence.

Almost every region in Italy with productive agriculture has a version of this. It is not on Google. It is not on the tourist office’s list. Oh yeah, and it’s cash-only, of course.

The Italian system is not a relic. It is a working machine. The shops that look quaint to a foreigner are operating in the gap the supermarket cannot fill, doing the job of moving local food from where it was made to where it gets eaten. The next time you walk past the forno on the way to the Conad, walk into the forno. You will not be sorry.

The corner restaurant is called Tito del Molo. It has been on the same pier since decades, and the current version is the formal one in the most straightforward sense: linen on the tables, wooden chairs that match the bar, a laminated menu in three languages, a wine list with sections for Vermentino and Chianti and the bottles Tito imports because Tito imports them, attentive staff in aprons, a terrace that looks down at the fishing boats coming in. The food is the same as the kitchen has been making for nearly a century. Cacciucco the way Viareggio cacciucco should come out, the day’s fried catch in the local style, raw fish off the boat. It is, by every visible signal, the restaurant you stop at after the walk along the pier. Many people do. The bill, depending on the depth of your order, runs to fifty or seventy euros a head, which for what it is, in the spot it sits, is honest.

Directly behind it, sharing a back wall and the kitchen door, is the other one. It is called Piccolo Tito. Little Tito. The first time we walked up to it, I thought it was the restaurant's takeaway window in front. It is not.

It is a separate operation that the same family runs out of the same kitchen, opening to the side instead of the front, with a name printed in plain block letters above the door and no signal of any other kind that it should be taken seriously, and that arrangement is the entire reason this piece exists.

Piccolo Tito has no menu. There is a board behind the cashier with photographs of about twenty dishes, printed in slightly faded colors, each labeled with a number and a price. You stand in front of the board and decide what you want. There is no appetizer-pasta-main-dessert structure. There is fried fish in several configurations. There is grilled fish in fewer. There is spaghetti with clams (vongole) and one or two other shellfish pastas. There is bread if you ask. There is a Vermentino in a proper bottle, a couple of beers in cans, mineral water, and a Coca-Cola for the children. That is the whole offering. You point at the photographs. The cashier writes your order on a slip, tells you the total, takes your money, hands you a number printed in large black ink on a white card, and tells you to find a table.

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The tables are plastic. The chairs are plastic. There is no tablecloth. The cutlery comes in a sealed sleeve, usually plastic itself, sometimes inexplicably steel, with no system I have ever decoded for which day delivers which, and the plates are paper or plastic depending on what is on them and whether the kitchen has decided that what is on them needs heat protection. The wine, however, arrives in proper glasses, in the proper bottle, with the proper opening ceremony. This is Italy. The wine is the one part of the operation that is allowed to remember it is a restaurant.

The number gets shouted from the counter when the kitchen is finished with it. You walk over, pick up the tray, walk back to the plastic table, sit, and eat. If the tray is heavy or you have come with more people than hands, one of the men who circulate on the floor sometimes carries it over, but the default is that you do it yourself. After the meal, you carry the tray back to a station by the door and tip the plates into the bin. The whole place has the rhythm of a school cafeteria run by people who happen to be excellent cooks.

The food on the tray is what the place is for. The spaghetti alle vongole comes in a paper-rimmed plastic bowl, the portion roughly twice the version next door, oilier, salt-bright, the clams in a small pile on top because no one had ten seconds to arrange them around the edge of a porcelain plate. The grilled prawns come on a flat plate, a dozen lined up as they landed when the cook tipped them out of the pan, with a half-lemon and nothing else. No bed of arugula. No drizzle. The frittura mista, which is the dish that has made Piccolo Tito’s name in the town that knows it, arrives in a paper cone the size of a small bouquet, the small fish and the calamari and the prawns and the fried squash blossoms all together, hot, salted, eaten with the fingers. There is a wedge of lemon. Sometimes there are two. Sometimes the lemon is forgotten, in which case you ask, and a wordless plate of lemon arrives within ninety seconds.

The secret, and the reason I am writing this, is that the plate sitting in front of you at Piccolo Tito came out of the same kitchen that produces the plate at Tito del Molo, twenty meters away, around the corner. The same fish. The same cooks. The same grill, the same fryer, the same morning’s catch sourced from the same fishermen at the same kilo price. The kitchen door behind the counter at Piccolo Tito and the kitchen door at the back of Tito del Molo open onto the same room. What Tito del Molo adds is the linen, the porcelain, the parsley sprinkled on top of the pasta, the wedge of lemon placed deliberately, an extended appetizer-and-dessert section to round out a meal in the formal sense, and the wine list that runs to 10+ pages. What it charges for those additions is, by our rough accounting over the years, just under double what Piccolo Tito charges for the same fish without them.

I do not begrudge Tito del Molo the markup. Some occasions earn the linen. If it is a date, an anniversary, or a parent in town to whom you would prefer not to explain why your dinner came on a plastic tray, you take the linen. That is what the linen is for. The point is that on most evenings most of the year, with most people you are eating with, the linen is the thing you are paying double for, and the food is the thing you came for, and the food is identical.

The crowd at Piccolo Tito is locals. Older men from the fishing harbor still in their work clothes. Carpenters from the shipyard at the far end of the pier. Families with three generations at the table, the grandmother carrying her own tray with both hands, the grandchild running the number-card to the counter as a small game while the parents wait at the plastic table with the bottle of Vermentino already poured. We have never seen another foreigner there. Not once. The foreigners are next door, eating the same fish off a porcelain plate, paying for the chair.

The choice between the linen and the plastic is, in compressed form, the choice this whole publication exists to argue for. It is the same choice between Lucca and Florence, between Pisa‘s south bank and its tower, between Livorno and Forte dei Marmi, between Sestri Levante and Portofino, and the logic is identical each time: the destination version costs more and looks better in a photograph and gives you something to point at later; the other version is closer to the thing the place is actually about. Picking the second one requires a small amount of nerve. The other version looks, from the outside, like nothing. You have to be willing to walk past the linen and into the plastic, to eat off a paper plate twenty meters from a restaurant you could have eaten at instead, to be the kind of person who would rather have the fish than the photograph of the fish.

After lunch, we take the same walk as the people from the linen-cloth restaurant. Out to the cat at the end of the pier, back along the same stone path, with the same view of the same boats coming in. The fishermen have gone home by now. The kitchen-boats have packed up. The light off the water is what late-lunchtime light off the water is. The restaurant behind us continues to fill with people who decided the linen was what they came for, and the counter behind it continues to feed those who decided it was not. The cooks in the one kitchen at the back of both buildings go on cooking the same fish.

If you prefer, we recommend trying out the Delfino as well. Same concept, same prices, just next to Tito, but they cook with a bit more garlic and oil, which is sometimes too much for us, though they somehow manage to source fresh octopus, as they always have fried octopus on the menu. Just that dish is worth the stop.

We had had a heavy breakfast, the weather was the kind of weak Tuscan sun that promises a good afternoon and threatens an evening of rain, and Sophia and I had reached the point when we literally said: “We are bored by the sea. This is obviously not true. I couldn’t imagine myself living anywhere else, but we needed a change in scenery so much.

We did not want the mountains again. We did not want to fight for parking in Pisa, which is what fighting for parking in Pisa is. We wanted to walk somewhere that was not the sea, was flat enough for shoes that should not get muddy, and was an hour from home. The Pistoia zoo is in the hills a few minutes outside the town. The town was forty minutes from us. We went for the zoo and stayed for the town. Both turned out to be worth the drive, for entirely different reasons.

A note on the zoo… We do not particularly like the concept of zoos. We had a dog for many years, and we know how much a fenced run does to an animal that wants more space, and we understand the standard objections better than someone making them in the abstract. We went anyway. The reason, which Sophia named honestly some years ago, is that the kind of nature walk we actually enjoy is the kind that lets her keep her white shoes white at the end of it. This rules out most of what people mean when they recommend a walk in nature. Botanical gardens qualify. Zoos qualify. Cities qualify. Forest paths, mountain trails, anything involving mud, do not. The list of available activities for a sunny Saturday in our part of Tuscany, when you have already done the sea three times that week and would like to walk somewhere on flat, clean paths, is short. The Pistoia zoo is on it.

The zoo was founded in April of 1970 by a Tuscan animal enthusiast named Raffaello Galardini, has been in the same family more or less ever since, and has spent the last twenty-some years converting itself from the original kind of zoo (animals exhibited to a paying public, which is the model the twentieth century invented and which has aged badly) to the current kind of zoo (a conservation park with rescued animals from circuses and private collections, breeding programs for endangered species, large naturalistic enclosures, the EAZA programs for things like the leopard and the red panda and the lynx). The bears live in a wooded enclosure that gives them genuine room. The big cats have similar space. The wolves have new enclosures built since 2005 that resemble the woods they would otherwise live in. The most striking thing, on the day we visited, was the birds. A great many of the large birds are not in cages at all. They roam the gravel paths along with the visitors. We met a peacock at a bend in the path that did not move for us. We stood and waited. The peacock waited longer. We eventually went around it.

It is a small zoo. It is seven hectares on a wooded hill. It has, depending on the year, around four hundred to five hundred and fifty animals across a hundred species, and you can walk the whole thing in two hours at a comfortable pace. It is not a safari. It is not a Berlin Zoo. It is, in the honest sense, a park with animals, organized around the principle that some of the animals here would otherwise be dead, and the ones that were born here are getting the best version of captivity that a small Italian zoo can build them. You do not need to enjoy zoos to enjoy this one. We did. We came out of it ready for lunch and looking for a walk on something other than gravel, which is where the town comes in.

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Pistoia is forty minutes from us by car and twenty-five minutes from the center of Florence. The train runs, and if you are in Florence and the August crowds and the noise have begun to feel like the inside of a not-quite-clean drum, Pistoia is one of the easier escapes from the city that does not require a serious day’s commitment. We parked without difficulty in a normal city lot near the center, which is the first detail that distinguishes Pistoia from the larger Tuscan cities and a meaningful one for anyone who has spent a day trying to park in Pisa or Lucca or central Florence. The whole town walks easily from a single parking decision.

The city itself is, structurally, a small Florence. This is the read I would give it after a single afternoon, and it is the read I would defend on a second visit. The Piazza del Duomo is a Florence-style square, anchored by a Romanesque cathedral with a separate bell tower that began life as a Lombard watchtower, with a fourteenth-century octagonal baptistery sheathed in bands of Carrara white and Prato green marble across the square from the cathedral, and the medieval Palazzo Comunale and Palazzo Pretorio on the long sides. The piazza is anomalously large for the town it sits in, designed centuries ago for a city Pistoia thought it would be and never quite became. The cathedral inside holds a silver altar of Saint James that is, by the quiet consensus of people who think about Italian goldsmithing, one of the great pieces of medieval European silverwork.

The streets running off the piazza are narrow medieval, the way Florence’s streets are narrow medieval, with the same pattern of stone palaces and ground-floor shops that the central Florentine grid has, and most of the same shop-front architecture. What Pistoia does not have, which Florence has and which is the single largest reason Florence is Florence and Pistoia is not, is the Arno. The river runs through the outskirts. The old town is dry. No bridges, no riverbank, no Ponte Vecchio reflected at golden hour. This subtraction is most of the explanation for why one of these towns is on every Italian itinerary, and the other is on almost none of them. The other part of the explanation is that Pistoia spent most of the fourteenth century being absorbed by Florence after losing the kind of internal war the medieval Italian comuni were particularly good at losing, and once you are absorbed into Florence, the next eight hundred years are spent being a small town outside Florence rather than a small republic of your own. The town never recovered the momentum.

Which is, for the visitor, fine. What Pistoia is now is a working medium-sized Tuscan town with a well-preserved historical center and almost no tourists for most of the year, in which the architecture and the food and the streets are the architecture and food and streets of any other well-preserved Tuscan town of its tier, and which earned the title of Italian Capital of Culture in 2017 essentially because someone in the relevant ministry finally noticed all this and gave it a designation. The honest version of the recommendation is this. If you have not seen Florence, see Florence. If you have been to Florence and you have seen one or two other mid-sized Tuscan towns, Lucca or Arezzo or Cortona, you can skip Pistoia and not miss something the others are not giving you in fuller form. Pistoia is not, in this sense, a destination. It is a town. Which is a fine thing for a town to be. It is also, on a sunny Saturday between a zoo and home, exactly the size and shape of city walk we had come out for.

What does distinguish Pistoia, and what we would now drive back for on its own, is the food culture in the cafés. I am going to set this up carefully because the observation matters, and the way it arrived matters more.

We noticed it because we live here. Not in Pistoia, but in Tuscany. For years now, in Versilia, an hour west of Pistoia by the road that runs along the foot of the Apuane. After enough time in any country, you stop seeing the things every town shares and start seeing the things specific towns do that the others around them do not. The architecture of two Italian medium-sized towns of the same tier is, at the level of an afternoon visit, 60 to 70 percent the same. The food and the daily customs are the same percentage. What you learn to read, after enough Saturdays driving an hour to walk through the next medium-sized town along, is the 30 to 40 percent that differs. In Liguria, you can tell which town is the pesto town, the focaccia town, and the anchovy town. In coastal Tuscany, you read them to see which one does its own version of cacciucco and which one has the better frittura. The reading happens fast once you are in it. It is invisible to most outside writing because it does not have the time on the ground.

We walked into a café in the late afternoon. It was four o’clock or close to it. We had had a heavy breakfast, skipped lunch, and were now hungry, the way you are when you have walked through a zoo and a town on a single coffee and a glass of water. The case in the front of the café was full of savory things. Not the standard Italian bar arrangement, where the case is roughly eighty per cent sweet pastries and twenty per cent savory bits to graze on alongside the espresso. The other way around. Slabs of torta salata of three or four kinds. Small focaccia stuffed with vegetables. A wedge of schiacciata with rosemary and onion. A short row of tramezzini on the bottom shelf, the soft white-bread triangles you find in every Italian café from Trieste to Palermo, looking, in this case, like an afterthought rather than the main act. The sweets were a small section on one side.

We ordered sandwiches. Sophia ordered the torta salata. I ordered something I thought would be a tramezzino, but it turned out to be a different category of object entirely. The standard Italian tramezzino is a soft, crustless, white-bread triangle, lightly filled, the snack you eat standing at a bar between two real meals. What arrived at our table was a long sandwich on proper crusty bread, halved on the diagonal, filled with cured pork and an actual salad of greens, tomato, and pickled vegetables, the kind of thing you would not eat standing because it would not let you. It was a meal. It was the kind of sandwich a German or a British café would build for the lunch trade, where the bread is the main player, and the filling earns its keep. The tramezzino tradition is that the bread is a vehicle for the filling. The Pistoiese sandwich tradition, if I can call it that on the basis of a single afternoon and the half of a second one we have done since, is that the bread is the thing and everything else cooperates.

I do not know, sociologically, why Pistoia does cafés this way. I have looked. The Italian-language sources I checked do not write about it, which is consistent with the rule I described above: locals do not write about the things they take for granted, and outside writers do not get close enough to register the difference. There is a thin historical thread you can pull on if you want to. The Roman name for Pistoia was Pistoria, which derives from the Latin root for baker, as the town began in the second century BCE as the bakery supplying the Roman troops moving along the consular road from Lucca to Florence. Two thousand years of bakery identity might still be doing some work in the modern café case. It might not. The historical resonance is too tidy to be conclusive, and it is the kind of explanation that gets reached for when you do not have a better one.

What I can say with confidence, because we were there and we saw it, is that the Pistoiese cafés are not Italian cafés, in the way that almost every other café in Tuscany is. They are closer to the cafés you walk into in Vienna or in a French provincial town, where the savory tradition runs as deep as the sweet one, the cases are stocked accordingly, and the sandwiches are real food. We left two hours later with the rest of the torta salata in a paper bag, the way you leave a German bakery in the late afternoon, not the way you leave an Italian bar.

We drove home along the road that runs from Pistoia to Lucca to Pietrasanta, past the foot of the Apuane. The promised rain had not arrived. The sun was low. Sophia’s shoes were still as white as they had been when we left the house in the morning. We talked, mostly, about the bread.

This edition might upset some of you, but Anywhere Italy is built on honesty and frankness. It takes guts to recommend destinations that almost no one else recommends. I saw a trailer of a documentary recently. It’s The Siege of Paradise, a documentary about how overtourism ruins the Cinque Terre and its local way of life. The documentary will air at Tribeca. For now, here is the trailer.

Aside from the fact that all the tourists they interviewed are astonishingly clueless and shallow, especially the influencers, almost itchingly stupid, the movie’s entire premise kept me thinking.

Of course, it is not new. We even wrote about it here: why the dolce far niente, the art of doing nothing, is fake, and you can’t just experience it by taking a trip to Italy. But that doesn’t mean people stop coming. The photograph doesn’t require you to understand what is in the frame. People are coming to Firenze without knowing more about the Renaissance than can be explained in a 30-second TikTok video, and they will come, no matter what.

The main question is, though, why?

Why come to a village that looks almost identical to other similar villages in Liguria? Why make a big fuss about the Italian way of life there, the slowness, the tranquility?

I spent my childhood in a village in Hungary and regularly go back there to visit my family. In that village, almost nothing happens. Life is slow. I bet it is the case with most villages, anywhere.

Riomaggiore has fewer than 1500 inhabitants. Many of them don’t even live there. Of course, it is a slow pace. Of course, it has what tourists call dolce far niente. Locals call it Wednesday. So traveling to see that makes no sense. Just visit your nearest quiet village locally.

I am sure that whoever goes to a pesto-making cooking class has almost no idea about Ligurian culture. So I am also sure that most tourists have no idea why the Cinque Terre villages look the way they do and what that means for their culture. But they “understand” what they see with their eyes (if they can look beyond their iPhone camera, which they rarely do), and the surroundings are amazing, yes.

But is it the why? Are we traveling to slower-paced places because our lives are insane-level overloaded and fast? Or did we see a Netflix series or read Eat, Pray, Love (more likely: saw the movie) and want to experience it live?

I do not have the answer to the why. But what I cannot understand is this: why do we travel to an overcrowded place and suffer the effects of overtourism? Not as a local, I can totally get that. If these people started to show up in my backyard, I would either sell my home or turn it into a forever Airbnb, hand the keys to an agency, and move away. But as a tourist, even as a tourist, this is unbearable.

So, if there is any clean or majestic purpose I have for Anywhere Italy, it is this: somehow relieve the effects of overtourism on the local way of life by showing better alternatives for travelers. It is a win for everyone: sustainable travel, balanced local economies, less angry locals, and travelers who experience something unique, really unique this time.

Alla prossima,

Peter

Still in Torino, 7 June 2026

What’s new on our site: The alternative Cinque Terre

I got so anxious about this topic that I changed my editorial plan for this week, dropped Tuscany, and started documenting Liguria.

First, Lerici. The town overlooked by everyone booking a place in the Cinque Terre towns. 10X more convenient, 10X more liveable, and equally beautiful.

Second, the Magra delta, the national park between the Carrara mines and the start of the Cinque Terre area. Literally almost no one visits these towns, and I wholeheartedly don’t understand why.

Our free database and travel planner app launched last week. Our goal is to cover all of the towns in there with this publication, but until we do, browse our hand-selected list of the best truly off-the-beaten-path Italian towns. Based on the database, there is also a travel planner app you can use to plan your next trip. All free.

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We took the second trip on a Saturday in May for the first time, soon after we had moved to Pietrasanta. The plan had been to drive up and find out what Lerici was. The plan lasted about ten minutes after we arrived, because Lerici on a Saturday in May, even before the high season really begins, is already full, and after circling the harbor twice and looking once into a paid lot that was already at capacity, we gave up and kept driving back south. The drive that followed, by accident, became the loop we have repeated several times since, in every season, when we want to leave Versilia for half a day and come back to it remembering why we live here.

The whole circle is small. You could throw a stone across it. It is contained within a regional park called the Montemarcello-Magra-Vara, named for two of the rivers within it and for a small hilltop village on the headland that curves around the road. It runs from Tellaro, on the cliff above the eastern side of the Gulf, up onto the Caprione promontory, down to the mouth of the Magra at Bocca di Magra, inland to Sarzana, and back to the highway. The whole thing is about fifty kilometers without traffic and just over an hour of driving.

There is a thing to know about this part of Italy before you drive it, because the whole loop is organized around a city that no longer exists. Or, it kinda does… Anyways, obviously the Romans founded Luni in 177 BCE on what was, at the time, the eastern bank of the Magra mouth and is now about a kilometer inland, the river having moved in the centuries since. They founded it as the port for the marble they were cutting out of the Apuane behind us, the marble we now call Carrara marble but the Romans called lunense, Luni marble, for the city that shipped it. By the third century, Luni was a city of fifty thousand people, with a forum, two big bath complexes, an amphitheater for seven thousand, and patrician houses with mosaic floors and frescoed walls. A fourth-century earthquake brought half the temples down. The port silted up over the centuries that followed, the river kept moving, malaria came into the marshes, and in 860 a Saracen raid was so devastating that the city never came back. The bishop kept his seat there, in increasing degrees of pretend, until 1204, when he gave up and moved a few kilometers inland to Sarzana. The city was looted for its marble for the next six hundred years to build everything around it. Dante mentioned its ruin in the Paradiso. The whole region is called Lunigiana, the land of Luni, for a city you cannot find on a modern road map. Well, you can, but that’s different. We will come to it. It matters to everything else.

Tellaro is what you do when you cannot park in Lerici. It is the cliff village three kilometers south, the last small settlement before the rocks turn south and the road begins to climb inland, and it is the casual Ligurian village where you arrive at the top and walk down. You park in a paid lot at the cliff edge and you take the road that drops in steep switchbacks into the houses below. The slope is not friendly. It is something close to forty-five degrees on the steepest stretches, the streets are narrow enough that the walls press on both shoulders, the steps are old and uneven, and twenty minutes of going down means twenty serious minutes of going back up in the heat. You should know this before you begin.

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At the bottom is a small harbor with a stone breakwater, a lighthouse on the rocks, and a clutch of pastel fishermen’s houses that the sea reaches in storms. No castle. No fortress. No museum, no commercial restoration, no story to tell except the one about the octopus, which I will get to. The houses press themselves against the cliff in the way Cinque Terre houses do, the pinks and oranges and yellows and that one yellow-green that is only ever painted on a Ligurian fishermen’s house. In a storm, the waves reach the first floors. We have seen the photographs. We have never been there during the storm.

This is, structurally, a Cinque Terre village. Same architecture, same colors, same fishing-village footprint, same cliff. The only thing it does not have is the part of the Cinque Terre that other people will tell you not to skip: the people. On our first Saturday in May, we had Tellaro almost to ourselves. I do not know why this is. Tellaro is on every list of the Borghi più belli d’Italia, it has its own fully spread Wikipedia entry in multiple languages, and it is twenty minutes by car from a town that is full on the same afternoon. But Tellaro is not full. The four times we have been on a busy weekend, it has never been full. The bars in the harbor were maybe a quarter taken. The restaurants had tables free. The only thing happening on our first visit was a small group of children kicking a ball against the back of the church wall, and the dog watching them. From November till April, the place is literally empty.

You climb back up to the parking lot. You get in the car. The road continues south along the cliff, the sea on your right, and then it bends inland into the woods, and the trees close over you and you forget the sea entirely for fifteen minutes of switchbacks through holm oak and pine. The road is the SP28, and it climbs the spine of the Caprione promontory, which is the headland that separates the Gulf of La Spezia from the mouth of the Magra. The first time we drove this, after the failed parking in Lerici and the discovery of Tellaro, we were not sure where we were going. We had a vague idea that the road continued. It continued. It brought us, after about twenty minutes, to a small village called Montemarcello, which we had never heard of and which sits 266 meters above sea level on a flat hilltop with views in three directions.

I will say this about Montemarcello, and then I will defend it. It has the best panorama in Liguria, full stop, and I do not think it is close. The reasons are two. The first is the obvious one. You are 266 meters up, the cliff is high enough that there is no rocky beach below to draw a crowd, the sea on one side is the Gulf of La Spezia with Portovenere across the water and the Cinque Terre fading north, and the view on the other side is the Magra running into its delta with the white Apuane behind it and Tuscany beyond. The second reason is the one I care about more. There is almost never anyone there. I am not exaggerating. We have been many times, in winter, in fall, in summer, and we have always been able to find a parking space and sit in the small square without queuing for a coffee. The town is on the Borghi più belli d’Italia list. It is the namesake of the national park. None of this seems to have made it busy. I have no explanation for this.

The town itself is a Roman castrum. The streets are the only intact Roman street grid in the whole Magra valley, a perpendicular layout drawn by the engineers who came up here in the second century BCE to fortify the headland after the consul Marcus Claudius Marcellus had defeated the local Ligurians in 155. Mons Marcelli, Marcello’s hill. The town was named for the man who killed the people who had lived here before. There is a fifteenth-century gate, a small parish church, perhaps eight or nine streets in the grid, and one real square, named for the day in December 1944 when an American bomb killed the wrong people in the wrong house.

There is one place in the square where we go when we go to Montemarcello, which is more or less every time. It is called Il Bistrot delle Ragazze, the Girls’ Bistro, and it is run by what we believe is one extended family, all women, all originally from somewhere in North Africa (my bet: Morocco), who cook Ligurian food with a faint inflection that does not belong to Liguria. The pesto is Ligurian. The focaccia is Ligurian. The vegetables on the side of the focaccia are Ligurian. But they use a slightly more spice. And it is slightly more heated. And they have tagine, which is definitely not Ligurian. We have spent whole afternoons here. The square holds maybe four outdoor tables, the bistro another six inside, and the late lunch you started by one runs until four because nothing happens that asks you to leave. The Girls’ Bistro is what travel writing is supposed to find.

From Montemarcello you keep going on the SP28, which begins to descend, switchbacks down through the Caprione forest, and lands you in Bocca di Magra. We make this small detour every time. Bocca di Magra is a small marina town at the river mouth, a quay along the water with maybe twenty fishing boats and twenty pleasure boats and the same number of bars and gelaterias, and a promenade that runs four hundred meters until the river meets the sea. There is not much here. We sit, we have a coffee, we look at the boats, we walk to the end of the promenade and look at the Magra finishing itself into the gulf, and we walk back. The whole stop takes forty-five minutes. The reason to do it is that you have just driven through forest for an hour and the body wants water again. Both Montemarcello and Bocca di Magra belong to the same commune, Ameglia, which is the working town up the hill in between them and which I will not write about because we have never stopped there long enough to write about it honestly.

From Bocca di Magra you drive ten kilometers inland to Sarzana, which is where you eat dinner.

Sarzana is the city that took the bishop’s seat from Luni in 1204. It is the city the bishops moved to when the old Roman city had become too marshy and too saracened and too dead to be a city anymore, and it is therefore the city in which everything Luni had been continues, in attenuated form, eight hundred years on. The cathedral keeps the relic of the Holy Blood that the bishop carried with him when he left Luni. The fortress on the hill above the town, the Sarzanello, was built by the Bishop-Counts and then rebuilt by Castruccio Castracani of Lucca, who has appeared in every other piece we have written about this part of Italy and who turns up any time you cannot find someone more obvious to blame. There is another fortress inside the town, the Firmafede, which Lorenzo de’ Medici ordered rebuilt in its current form in 1487 after Florence had taken Sarzana, and which Florence then promptly lost again. Sarzana spent the medieval centuries being held by the bishops, then Lucca, then Pisa, then the Visconti, then Florence, then Genoa, then France, then Sardinia, then Italy.

What Sarzana kept, through all of this passing of hands, is an old town that looks like nothing else in Liguria. It looks like a small Lucca. The streets are flat and parallel, the central Piazza Giacomo Matteotti is grand and rectangular and Tuscan, the cathedral facade is Pisan, the eighteenth-century palaces on the main streets have been kept in good repair, and the food in the restaurants on the side streets is half Ligurian and half Tuscan, and not the messy ambivalent thing border food usually is. Pesto is on the menu and so is pappa al pomodoro. There is focaccia and there is pici. The people who live here describe themselves as proudly Tuscan despite the fact that they are administratively Ligurian, and the moment you meet one of them you understand that they are, in fact, Tuscan in the way that matters, which is in the food, the cadence of speech, and the willingness to argue.

We eat in Sarzana at a place called Simon Boccanegra, which is the strongest single dinner a Ligurian kitchen can put in front of you without breaking out into a Michelin star. They take the focaccia and treat it as a dish. They take pesto and treat it as if it were a sauce on a Michelin plate. They are, as Italians do, simultaneously serious about the food and not serious about themselves. The whole thing is a small hotel above the restaurant, run by the same family. Before we eat, we sometimes drive five minutes up to the Sarzanello fortress on the separate hill above the town, which you reach by a brief, steep climb (drive, please), and from the top of the keep you see the whole Magra valley spread out beneath you. The Apuane to the south are still white at the tops in late spring. The river is a brown line running between green plains. The houses of the towns on the other slope are visible, one of them being Castelnuovo Magra, which I will come to in a moment. The fortress itself is, as a fortress, not very interesting unless military architecture is something you enjoy. The point is the view.

That is the loop. From Sarzana you take the A12 south for fifteen minutes and you are home, in Versilia, which now feels like a flat sandbar after the height and the woods and the river mouth. The first time we did this drive, we got home after dark. Sophia said her legs hurt from Tellaro, and we agreed to do it again. We have done it again. We have done it many times, in many seasons, with the same itinerary, the same restaurants, and the same long, late lunch in the square at Montemarcello. The drive is the destination. The story is not the towns; the story is the loop.

Over the years, we have added or substituted stops. Two are worth telling.

The first is Castelnuovo Magra. Castelnuovo is a hill town on the eastern slope of the Magra valley, visible from Sarzanello, and built around a now-ruined castle that the Bishop of Luni erected in the late twelfth century to defend against the Malaspina marquises. It is one of the better-preserved old hilltop towns in the whole valley. It has the things a good Italian hill town has: one main street paved in sandstone, a few palaces from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a parish church with a Brueghel inside that has been stolen and recovered enough times to be a small local epic, a tall remnant tower from the bishop’s fortress at the far end. Dante stayed at the castle, by the way. On the sixth of October 1306, he was here as the legal procurator for the Malaspina, negotiating and signing the peace treaty between the Malaspina and the Bishop of Luni inside the great tower. The local history is now largely organized around this one Dante day. One of the rooms in the tower has been turned into a Dante study. The Dante story, like the octopus story, is in this case true.

The reason to go is not Dante. The reason to go is a steakhouse called Bisteccheria Napoli e Pepe on the main street, which serves the kind of large, simple, wood-fired meat dinner you want after a long walk in a hill town and a long drive home. The walls have hams on them. The chairs are wooden. The wine is local, mostly the Vermentino these slopes produce in volume, the Colli di Luni DOC, which is one of the better white wines in Liguria and the one that Castelnuovo bothered to build a small wine museum for. The steaks are large and raw, like it should be. The drive from Sarzana is fifteen minutes uphill and then back down again. It does not really belong inside the day if you have done the full loop. It belongs as a substitute for Sarzana dinner if you are doing it on a different day, or as a separate evening if you have one to give.

The second is Luni itself, which we said we would come back to.

Luni is what remains of the city that gave the region its name. The first time we went, we expected a small site. It is not a small site. The Romans built large. The amphitheater is mostly intact, the forum is laid out and walkable, two of the great patrician houses have been partly reconstructed with their mosaic floors and their painted walls preserved, the foundations of the Capitoline temple are still where they were, the museum at the center has gathered the smaller finds. The whole park covers about thirty hectares. It’s mostly an open-air museum. It’s also free to visit, except for the amphitheater, which is like 5 EUR. The amphitheater is what you go for, by the way. It is just outside the Roman walls, on what was the eastern suburb of the city, along the old line of the Via Aurelia. You walk into it through one of the original arched entries, and you are alone. I mean that literally. We have been three times. The most other visitors we have seen in the place is six. Oh, and you can walk freely anywhere, no gates, no restricted areas. Which is a bit weird, because most of Luni is still an active archaeological site. The reason for the silence is that Luni does not exist on most tourist maps. It is not on the route. It is on the SS1 between Sarzana and Carrara, but you pass it without seeing it unless you have decided to come.

The whole modern commune is named after the dead city, in a small administrative reversal that I find I enjoy. Until recently, the modern village near the ruins was called Ortonovo, and Luni was a frazione of Ortonovo, and the ruins were inside Luni-the-frazione. The commune voted to rename itself, and Ortonovo became a frazione of Luni. The names have flipped. You can still go to Ortonovo, a small hilltop village visible from the ruins on the eastern slope, with views back across the Magra plain. From the amphitheater it looks pretty.

There is a thing to say about a road like this one, and I have said it before about another one of our roads, the inland one toward Aulla, but it is true twice. The Magra valley and the Caprione headland do not lead anywhere you cannot also reach by some other way. The Cinque Terre is famous. Lerici is on every coastal-Italy list and has been since the English Romantics drowned themselves here. Carrara is forty minutes away and is on every cruise itinerary. What sits between these places, in the small park behind the gulf, is what tourist Italy left over when it organized itself around the photogenic. A village where an octopus rang the bells. A hilltop town named for a Roman consul that the consul’s descendants never got around to making famous. A Tuscan city operating quietly in Liguria. A bishop’s palace where Dante did his diplomacy on the way to writing the Paradiso. A vanished Roman city whose name still organizes the food, the wine, the dialect, and the bureaucracy of an entire region.

The whole circle takes a day, if you do not stop anywhere for long. We have never done it in a day. The first time, on the Saturday in May, we drove home in the dark. We have done it many times since.

We are returning visitors at Lerici in a particular way. Most places we write about are places we went to once or twice. Lerici is the place we lived in for two weeks in the summer of 2021 and have been going back to every two or three months for five years. We know the steep streets above the castle by heart. We know which restaurant is for the view and which is for the dinner. We know that the gelato in San Terenzo, made at a place called La Rana Golosa, is worth the half-hour walk along the sea to find. We know the underpass that takes you to the small free beach under the castle, the rocks at the back of it, and the bench halfway along the promenade to San Terenzo where, on a good day, the wind off the Gulf has the precise temperature of being alive.

This is the love letter to the town we came to first, before everything else in Italy that we now call ours.

The summer of 2021 was its own thing. Europe had spent a year in various lockdowns, with borders open one month and closed the next, and the rules on testing and vaccination changing every six weeks. By that summer, the bigger picture had relaxed enough that you could travel within Schengen if you carried the right papers, which we did, and most people had not bothered yet, so the famous places were not yet famous again. We had been working online for years by then, both of us, and we did the thing we had been threatening to do for months, which was to pack the car in Budapest and disappear into Italy for months.

The plan had three clauses, and three only: Florence without the crowds, Rome without the crowds, and a stretch by the sea without the crowds. If you have been to Florence or Rome in any normal year, you understand why that no crowds clause was the load-bearing one.

Lerici was the part of the plan we had not really planned. We had never been to the Ligurian coast. We had never seen the Cinque Terre. We had a two-week rental booked next to the castle, sight unseen, picked because the apartment looked good in the listing and the town sat on the map between two longer stays. We drove in from Florence, parked badly, walked through the old town for the first time, and within an hour we were already lying about leaving.

Those two weeks remain among the best two weeks we have spent in Italy. Some of it was the moment, of course. We were younger then, and the country was emptier than it had been since the war, and everything we touched had the quality of a place that had just been given back to its own people. But most of it was Lerici, and Lerici has carried the quality forward into every return since.

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The town climbs in tight terraces above a half-moon harbor that looks east across the Gulf of La Spezia. There is one castle at the top, built by the Pisans in the middle of the thirteenth century to fight Genoa, and lost a few decades later to the Genoese after Lerici turned its small navy against the people who had built the castle. The town that had been the Pisan outpost helped finish Pisa as a sea power, and the castle that Pisa had built was repurposed within a generation to keep Pisa out. It is a small story, complete, and the castle still stands at the top of the hill above the kiosk, telling it.

There is an old town, narrow and steep and entirely walkable. There is a long promenade that runs along the water from Lerici proper to the village of San Terenzo, half an hour one way at a comfortable pace, and the promenade is the thing we always do first when we come back, because there is almost nothing in Liguria that is both right next to the water and not vertically punishing, and this promenade is both.

The flatness, I want to say, is the secret. The Cinque Terre, twenty kilometers up the coast and the reason most people know the eastern Ligurian Riviera at all, is built on cliffs. The five villages everyone goes to are five exhausting stair-climbs separated by ferry rides and a train. Photogenic, beautiful, brutal on the knees, and by ten in the morning impossible. La Spezia, the big working port at the head of the bay, is not a town you go to on holiday unless you live there, work there, or have a ship leaving that afternoon. Lerici sits to one side of all of it. The old town is small, and you need to climb only to visit the castle on the hill. The promenade along the harbor is flat. The ferries from the Lerici dock cross the gulf to Porto Venere and the Cinque Terre villages, which means you can walk down from your apartment, see Manarola for two hours, and be back in Lerici for dinner without standing in a single queue or taking a single bus. The town is the base. We figured this out by accident in our first week, and we have never seen anyone else write it down clearly.

The rhythm of our days that first stay was small. We walked the promenade in the morning before the heat, drank coffee somewhere with a view, sat for two hours of work with our laptops, and at noon walked down to the kiosk for the oysters and the sparkling wine. After lunch, we went either to the free beach, reached via the underpass beneath the castle you have to know about, or to the ferry. The free beach matters here. Free beaches in Liguria are rare, and the one under the Lerici castle is one of the small structural reasons the town is liveable in a way other Ligurian towns are not. In the late afternoon we sometimes ate at Ciccillo a Mare, a small restaurant on the rocks at the back of the same beach. The food at Ciccillo is not the best in town. The position is. We learned to go there for the coffee, the simplest things on the menu, and the view of the gulf turning gold, and the visit became its own ritual. In the evenings we ate at Focacceria dai Fanti up in the old town, which makes the kind of heavy, oily, sometimes-greasy focaccia that Liguria knows how to make and the rest of Italy does not, and pairs it with a cold beer for the price of one drink in Forte dei Marmi.

The literary content of the bay you may be wondering whether I am going to address. Briefly, yes.

Lerici and San Terenzo are where Percy Shelley and Mary Shelley lived for months in 1822. They rented a white arcaded house called Casa Magni on the beach at San Terenzo, where Percy spent that summer sailing a small boat back and forth between Lerici and Livorno, where Byron and Leigh Hunt were trying to start a magazine. On the eighth of July Percy sailed from Livorno back toward Lerici in his boat, which Byron had named the Don Juan and which Percy had renamed the Ariel. A storm caught the boat between the two ports. The boat went down. Percy’s body washed up ten days later on the beach at Viareggio, which is to say in the middle of Versilia, which is to say a few minutes from where we live now. The bay was renamed the Gulf of Poets ninety years later by an Italian playwright, in honor of all this, and the bay's institutions have been selling the story ever since.

There is a plaque at a grotto in Porto Venere commemorating Byron’s heroic swim across the gulf to visit Shelley at Lerici. An annual swim race honors the swim. A grotto carries his name. The swim probably never happened. Byron most likely did not make it. The plaque is from later, the legend later still, and the race much later. I find this very Italian and quietly moving. A town that builds a plaque for a swim that may not have happened, holds an annual race for it, and gives the grotto the swimmer’s name, is a town that has decided the story is more useful than the fact. I find no fault with the decision.

I will admit a personal interest in one of the side stories. On the hills above the harbor stands a villa called La Padula, built in the late nineteen-twenties for a Hungarian baroness called Emma Orczy and her husband, an English painter named Montague Barstow. They lived there from 1927 to 1933, all the autumns and springs of six years, with the winters spent in Monte Carlo. There is a plaque at the gate. Anyone who grew up in the part of Hungary I grew up in knows the Orczy name the way Americans know the Astors and the English know the Sackvilles. They were one of the older Hungarian aristocratic families, with land in our region, a name on a square in Budapest, and a long reputation. Emma was the one who left for England as a child, married a painter, taught herself to write, and produced The Scarlet Pimpernel, which made her enough money to buy a villa in Monte Carlo and then to build another one above this bay. She left Italy in 1933 because fascism was getting too loud for her.

You come to a bay because the English Romantics drowned there, and you find that one of the Hungarian baronesses had figured the bay out a hundred years before you, and you keep walking, because it is lunchtime, and there are oysters waiting at the kiosk.

We almost lived there, in the end, after that summer. We looked at apartments in the old town and at a small house near San Terenzo. The numbers nearly worked. We ended up in Pietrasanta, but years later, which is half an hour south of Lerici. We come back constantly. There is one of the small villages within the Lerici commune that we like better than any of the Cinque Terre, because it is the only one we can guarantee will be quiet, and we will write about that one, Tellaro, on its own. The piece you are reading is the one for the town we almost lived in.

On the morning we left for Florence in 2021, we got up early and walked the promenade one last time. The harbor was awake. The fishing boats were going out. Sophia took a picture of the castle in the morning light. We ate at the kiosk, of course, you can’t have enough raw oysters. Then we drove down the coast to begin the part of the trip that was supposed to be the sea-without-crowds clause of the plan, and we did not yet know that we would be back in two months, and then again in four. The old friend was already an old friend by the second visit. The first stay had just been long enough to make it so.

The first time I understood the same idea could be done with the sea was in Barcelona. What I ate there was a Catalan fish stew, can’t remember its name, tomato, a little chili, and seafood, mostly octopus, mussels, and prawns. With sea fish and shellfish, I admit it plainly, this whole line of cooking is better. I tasted bouillabaisse later in a French port town and loved it. But before I moved to Italy, I had never heard of the Italian version.

After I moved to a few minutes from Viareggio, I understood why.

Most people who come to Italy spend their two weeks either in the Renaissance cities or on a beach under a parasol, and almost nobody visits a port city. We wrote about this idea in our Livorno piece. A port city is, at most, a place you pass through to catch a ferry to an island. It is dirtier than most Italian cities, usually without the historic core, usually without a beachfront worth photographing, with working noise and a working smell that some people love and some people do not. I love it. There are exceptions. People do spend days in Naples. But even in Naples, what most travelers actually want is Amalfi.

Caciucco is the port city’s soup. It exists where the fishermen exist, where there is a harbor, where there is a morning catch that nobody at the market wanted to buy at the high price, and where the cheap small fish accumulate until somebody figures out you can throw all of it into one pot, cook it down with tomato and garlic, season it lightly, and eat it with stale bread alongside. It is, almost always, a meal in itself. One heavy course. A big plate, eaten with a spoon and your hands and a glass of red wine and several pieces of bread that disappear into the bowl one at a time.

There is a fight between Livorno and Viareggio over whose version is the real one, because of course there is. It’s almost funny to see how this thing never changes, since in Hungary there are also two main camps of halászlé: the Szeged version and the Baja version. The only difference is that one puts noodles in and almost grinds the entire fish pieces into the jelly-like liquid. The other has no noodles and keeps the fish pieces intact. Now, in this Italian battle, Livorno claims its cacciucco is the original and spells it with five C’s. The rule, never written down, is that a proper cacciucco requires five different kinds of fish, one for each letter. Viareggio dropped one of the C’s at some point. Viareggini call theirs caciucco, with four. To a Livornese, this is the worst possible insult, and whether the missing C represents a missing fish or just an underdeveloped vowel discipline depends on who is telling you the story and how many glasses in.

The versions are different and the geography is why. Viareggio’s harbor is shallower and more crooked than its neighbors up the coast, and the boats come back with small shellfish, crabs, shrimp, and smaller fish. The local soup runs heavier on the things in shells and the things with claws. Livorno’s harbor is deeper and broader, and its boats come back with proper fish, larger pieces, more fillet. The Livornese cacciucco leans more toward fish flesh and less toward shellfish. Genoa has its own version up the Ligurian coast, and I have not tried that one yet, but the logic is presumably the same: in every port city on every coast in the world, the harbor decides the bowl.

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What I did not expect, after the Hungarian, the Catalan, and the French, was how restrained the Italian version is. Halászlé punches you with paprika. It’s spicy, and I mean very spicy. Yet most Hungarians add even more green, spicy peppers as a topping. The Catalan version comes at you with chili and aromatics. Bouillabaisse layers things until the rouille on the side is doing half the work. Caciucco is quieter. Tomato, silky, salty, slightly hot, but the spice is in support, not in lead. What dominates is the combined taste of the fish and shellfish, and the way the broth has reduced to absorb their character without flattening it. Roughly, it is a large bowl of red sea. The sea is what you taste. The kitchen is doing very little to it. Once you have eaten it on the right kind of day in the right kind of port city, the louder versions start to feel like apologies for less interesting fish.

There are rules. The bread underneath has to be Tuscan bread, the unsalted kind, several days old, toasted hard and rubbed with raw garlic. Red wine alongside, never white (fish usually demands white wine, except here). The fish has to be the day’s catch, full stop. Frozen does not work. The flavor depends on a freshness window measured in hours, not days, which is why you cannot eat a proper caciucco anywhere there is no sea. Some restaurants inland will offer you one. Do not order it. The point of the dish is the proximity. The boats came back this morning, the kitchen sorted through what could not be sold individually, and the customer who eats the result will walk back along the same harbor where those boats are tied up after lunch.

Many places in Viareggio keep it on the daily menu. A few treat it as Sunday lunch only, in limited quantities, the way certain dishes were once meant to be eaten by people who worked all week manually and got one heavy meal on the seventh day. The two places I would send you for it in Viareggio are Il Capitano and Piccolo Tito. Both are within walking distance of the harbor, which is exactly where they should be. Order it as a single course, with bread and red wine, the way the dish was meant to be eaten. Do not pair it with anything elegant. Do not order a dessert afterward. You will not want one.

I knew about the aperitivo before I moved to Italy. Most people do. It is somewhere in the first ten Italian words a foreigner learns, after pizza and pasta and ciao and grazie, on the same shelf as espresso and gelato. By the time you arrive in the country, you have a picture in your head. The picture is roughly this:

An afternoon thing, around five or six. A drink, probably a Spritz, probably orange. Some snacks on the table, olives and crisps and small focaccia squares. A social occasion, with friends. Outside if the weather is good.

That picture is true. It is also missing most of what makes the aperitivo an institution rather than a drink.

I have lived in Versilia for over two years now, and I have done the aperitivo hundreds of times. What I learned, slowly, is that the aperitivo is not a drink-and-snack ritual. It is a structural hinge. Italians eat dinner late, around eight-thirty or nine, and they do not want to arrive at the table starving and exhausted. The aperitivo is the deliberate hour-and-a-half they put between work and dinner to bridge the gap. The drink and the snack are tools inside the hinge. The hinge is the institution.

Once you see this, the rest of it makes sense.

What I thought: it is an afternoon thing

What I learned: it is a pre-dinner thing, and the difference matters.

The aperitivo hour is locked to the dinner that follows it. Italians sit down to dinner at eight-thirty, sometimes nine (!). The aperitivo is the ninety minutes immediately before. In Versilia that means six-thirty until eight. In Milan it can run earlier, six until seven-thirty, because Milan is a working city and people eat slightly earlier. In Naples and Sicily it can start as late as eight, because dinner is later too.

If you order a Spritz at three in the afternoon, you are not having an aperitivo. You are having a Spritz. A Venetian woman once told a writer that when she went to Milan and tried to order an aperitivo at eleven in the morning, the woman behind the counter looked at her and said Aperitivo? You know what time it is? The hour matters. The hour is half the institution.

What I thought: it is a drink with finger food

What I learned: it depends entirely on where you are, and the food is almost always free.

This is the move that breaks every foreign expectation. In most of Italy, in most bars, the aperitivo food comes with the drink. You order a Spritz for six or seven euros and a small bowl of olives appears, then a bowl of crisps, then a small plate of focaccia, then maybe a few slices of salame. None of this costs extra. It is included in the price of the drink. The bar is making its margin on the cocktail and giving you the food to keep you in your seat for ninety minutes.

There is also a paid version called apericena, which is aperitivo and dinner combined into one transaction, usually a fixed price for a drink plus a board or buffet of food substantial enough to replace dinner. Apericena runs ten to fifteen euros, and it is a different institution, often complained about by Italian food writers because it has corrupted the original.

For our purposes, the rule is simple. If the aperitivo food is on a menu in English at a fixed price, you are in a tourist place. If the food appears at your table without you ordering it, you are in a real one.

What I thought: it is just cocktails

What I learned: it is whatever the bar wants it to be.

The classic aperitivo drinks are the ones the marketing has made famous. Aperol Spritz. Campari Spritz. Negroni. Americano. Hugo in the Alto Adige. A glass of Prosecco anywhere. These are the safe orders and any Italian bar can pour them.

But the real range is wider than that. I have had aperitivo with a glass of dry white wine and nothing else. With a Vermouth on the rocks with an orange peel, which is the original Turin version from the 1780s and still the best. With a small bottle of artisanal beer in a Tuscan craft brewery. Aperitivo is whatever you drink slowly with friends in the hour before dinner. The Spritz is the most popular form. It is not the only form.

What I thought: every place does it

What I learned: not every place does it, and the ones that do it best are not always the ones you expect.

The first rule of the aperitivo-place hierarchy is counterintuitive. The bars that do it best are usually not the simple morning-coffee bars. Those places focus on breakfast and lunch and they treat the aperitivo hour as a low-effort sideshow. You will get a small bowl of crisps, maybe a few olives, a Spritz that is fine but not memorable.

The bars that do it best are the ones that are only open in the afternoon and evening. Vinerie, cocktail bars, places designed around the drink rather than around the morning espresso. They have to make their entire week’s revenue between five and midnight, and they compete on the quality of what comes out with the drink. A good vineria in Pietrasanta will put down olives, crisps, focaccia, a small plate of salumi, a small crostino, maybe a slice of pecorino with honey. All of it free. All of it good. The Spritz costs the same as it does at the morning bar and you are getting four times the food.

The other rule is geography. The closer you are to the sea, the lighter the aperitivo. Olives, crisps, a little focaccia, maybe a bruschetta with tomato. The higher you go into the mountains, the heavier it gets. Salumi, cheese, sometimes a small bowl of polenta with a stew, sometimes a crostino with lardo. In an agriturismo in the Garfagnana I have eaten an aperitivo that was effectively a full meal of cured meats and pickled vegetables, and the bar that served it was a stone room with three tables and a wood stove. The aperitivo there was thirteen euros and I did not eat dinner that night.

What I thought: it is just for socializing

What I learned: it is for socializing, but the socializing is doing structural work.

The Italian dinner is long. It is, on average, two and a half hours from the moment you sit down to the moment the amaro is finished. It involves multiple courses, slow conversation, wine, and a real attention to the food. It is a substantial physical and social undertaking, and it does not work if you arrive at the table starved, tired from work, still mentally inside the email you sent at six-fifteen.

The aperitivo exists to solve this. It is the social airlock. You sit down at six-thirty, you have a Spritz with bitter botanicals that prime your stomach, you eat a few olives that prime your appetite without filling you, you talk to people, you watch the light change. By eight you have decompressed. By eight-thirty you are ready to walk to the trattoria and start the dinner properly.

This is also why good aperitivo places cluster near good restaurants. The aperitivo and the dinner are designed as a sequence. You do not stay at the bar through dinner. You drink, you talk, you leave, you walk five minutes to the place where you booked, you sit down, you start. The walk between is part of the architecture. So is the change of room.

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What I thought: Italians make great cocktails

What I learned: Italians make great Italian cocktails.

This is an honest observation and worth saying directly. In a normal Italian bar, ordering a Negroni or an Americano or a Spritz is a guaranteed good move. The barista has been making those drinks since before you were born. The proportions are correct, the ice is right, the glass is the right shape, the orange peel is fresh. You will get a properly executed aperitivo cocktail almost everywhere.

What you should not do, in a normal bar, is order a Daiquiri. Or an Old Fashioned. Or anything that requires a long bottle bench and a barman who specializes in international cocktails. The Italian bar’s bench is usually short. Campari, Aperol, Cinzano, Prosecco, gin, vermouth, the local amaro. That is the kit, and inside the kit they are world-class. Outside the kit, they are guessing.

If you want a serious cocktail, go to a dedicated cocktail bar. There are some extraordinary ones, especially in Milan and Turin and Florence, where the entire room is designed around the bartender’s bench and the bench is forty bottles wide. Italians can absolutely make great cocktails. They just do not make them at the corner bar that opened at seven in the morning.

This is unlike the Anglo-American world, where even a small village pub can usually pour a decent Old Fashioned. The Italian bar is excellent at its specific repertoire. Asking it to do something else is the same mistake as ordering tacos at a trattoria.

What I thought: it is a relaxed informal thing

What I learned: it is more structured than it looks.

The aperitivo hour at the Margherita, our bar in Marina di Pietrasanta, looks loose from the outside. People drift in around six. They sit at the small round tables. They drink. They talk. By eight the place is half empty as people leave for dinner.

What is actually happening is a precise sequence. The order arrives within two minutes. The first bowl appears with the drinks: olives, always. Five minutes later, crisps. Ten minutes after that, a small plate of focaccia squares cut warm, just out of the oven. Twenty minutes in, sometimes a crostino with whatever the kitchen has. The drink is sipped slowly because the food spaces it out. The bar refills nothing automatically. If you want a second Spritz, you have to ask. If you do not ask, you finish your one Spritz over forty-five minutes, you have eaten a few light salty things, and you are now in the right physical state to walk to dinner.

This pacing is not accidental. The bar wants you to leave for dinner around eight, partly because the next round of customers is arriving at eight-thirty for the post-dinner digestivi run, partly because the entire ecosystem only works if everyone moves through it on the same clock. The aperitivo is a hinge, and the hinge has to swing on time.

Order a Spritz. Sit somewhere with a view. Stay ninety minutes. Walk to dinner.

That is the whole thing.

We drove to Torino this weekend and we were almost the only car going north. Every other car was heading the other way, toward Liguria, toward the sea. The autostrada south of us was bumper to bumper at nine in the morning on a Saturday, families with bikes on the roof rack, dogs in the back seat, the windows down. The road north was empty. We had it to ourselves for most of three hours.

Torino, when we arrived, was almost empty too. Republic Day falls on Tuesday this year, June 2, and the country had already left.

In Italy, when a national holiday lands on a Tuesday or a Thursday, the Monday or Friday between it and the weekend becomes a holiday by default. The Italians call it fare il ponte. Making the bridge. The French say faire le pont. The Spanish hacer puente. The Germans, more pragmatic, obviously, say Brückentag. The whole Catholic-Latin core of Europe shares the metaphor and the move. The country closes for four days because the country has decided the date is more important than the schedule. And before you wonder, yes, most people take the remaining days off too on the expense of their paid leave allowances, which is around 25-40 days per year anyway, depending on your work history and contract. Yeah… Europe. Did I mention free healthcare too? :)

The Americans and the British engineered this out of their calendars. Most US federal holidays were quietly relocated to Mondays, so workers would not be tempted to take the bridge themselves. Memorial Day used to fall on the 30th of May, every year, fixed, the day the Civil War graves were decorated. Now it falls on the last Monday of May. Most Americans cannot tell you what the 30th was originally for. The date got sacrificed to the schedule, and the meaning went with it. It would be a sacrilege if people would have actual holidays, who would work then?!

This is the difference. A country that still lets its calendar tell the week what to do, versus a country that lets the week tell the calendar what to do. The ponte is the visible artifact of the first arrangement. Italians honor the date by refusing to be at work near it, and the rest of the week bends to accommodate. The Americans honor the schedule, and the date bends to accommodate, and eventually disappears.

We will drive home on Tuesday evening, against the tide again, while the rest of Italy comes back from the sea. The autostrada will be packed going south to north this time, full of sunburned families and damp towels and tired children, and we will pass them quietly going the other way, the way we came.

Torino on Tuesday afternoon will still be quiet.

Alla prossima,

Peter

Torino, 31 May 2026

What’s new on our site: Livorno, a love letter

As much as I love glamorous cities like Firenze, I have a weird affection towards cities with grit. I love Napoli, and, of course, I love Livorno as well. My love letter to Livorno:

As promised last week, I am quietly launching our site, towns. Anywhere Italy is about slow travel and the 1,000 hidden Italian towns that most travelers skip. I wanted us to be accountable, so I collected the 1,000 towns and put it up on a searchable database.

Currently, the site copy is AI-written, because of the scale of it. However, selection was fully manual, based on certain factors and public Italian quality classifications. As Anywhere Italy grows this year, we will change the towns’ content to our own Features. I can’t promise we will write and visit all these towns, but hey, this is an ongoing project.

Until then, feel free to browse the site. We also have a lovely travel planner app inside, totally free, based on our insanely detailed mega-database. If you spot a bug or an issue, let me know, we will fix it. Since this is a vibecoded site, it is in forever beta.

Browse Anywhere Italy Towns

We had come the first time as a calculation. We were looking for somewhere to live, a real rental, years rather than months, and Livorno kept showing up on the listings at prices that made no sense. Rooms in the middle of the city for less than you’d pay on the edge of Pisa, far less than Pietrasanta, where we ended up. So we drove down to see what was wrong with it. That is the honest reason people go to Livorno, when they go at all: to find out what’s wrong. Most travelers don’t go at all. To most of Italy and most of the world, Livorno is either a blank on the map or it is the place you pass through to get on a boat, the smell of diesel and the queue for the ferry to Corsica, Sardinia, or Elba, a city you experience entirely as a parking lot with water on the far side. We did that before when we visited friends in Corsica. We came to find the catch. We found it in one afternoon, decided we could not live there, and I drove home quietly in love. I know it is a contradiction, but you will get it why.

Every port has the same body underneath it. The shipyard men, the ferry men, the merchants moving whatever there is to move, and the whole supporting hum of people who feed and serve and repair them, all of it pressed up against the water. They tend to be rough, these cities, raw, a little dangerous or at least remembering when they were, and they all carry the same strange social split: the working class living down in the dense heart of the thing, loud and hard and almost violently friendly, and the money living up and out, in the hills, in quiet houses, the people who own the yards and the firms looking down at the place that makes them rich. An impossible mix of real wealth and the bottom of the ladder, sharing a coastline.

But the bodies are the same, and the faces are all different, and that is the whole interest of them. Marseille runs on a loose French commercial shrug. Genoa stacks merchant palaces over its dockside roughness like a man in a good coat with dirt under his nails. Trieste is all clean Austrian order, a port that files its paperwork. And then there is Livorno, which is something I have not seen anywhere else: the canals and the watery grandeur of Venice crossed with the unfiltered hardness of Genoa and Naples, a city that, for a second, looks as if it might be elegant and then opens its mouth.

I have always loved a place with two natures. The tension is the thing. It makes an atmosphere you cannot manufacture, and it makes the people who grow up inside it strange in the best way, relaxed in a register you don’t find elsewhere, and at the same time wound tight, quick, snapping, ready for anything to come around the corner. It’s the women of my twenties, the femme fatales, intense, a blessed dream at night, a nightmare during the day, a magnetic tension to be together, yet entirely impossible to live with. I would never live in Livorno. And Livorno would be the only place in Tuscany where I would spend some weeks, without a single blink of hesitation, just to be with the city.

I’m older now, and calmer than I was, and the edge that makes Livorno what it is would wear me down inside a season. But I would come here for three days before I’d go to Florence for three days, and it isn’t close. This is the trouble with the famous cities… They are predictable. You already know what Florence will give you before the train stops. Livorno? You cannot predict, and at a certain point in life, that becomes the only quality that matters.

Naples taught me this first. People do the Amalfi Coast and skip Naples, or they go in a guided group for an hour for the pizza and come back rattled by how raw it was. I lived in Naples for weeks once, and those days remain among the best I have had, and the people there are among the finest I have met anywhere in this country, and I love the place without reservation. Naples is the same love story as Livorno. I would never live there. It is exhausting in exactly the way the best things are exhausting, the way that, after a while, you have to walk away from to survive. Livorno has some of that in it. Plus the canals. They are beautiful, by the way.

The way to take a city like this is to take its rhythm from the first hour and not impose your own. So I did what the morning told me to. Coffee at the bar, then down toward the water to stand near the yards and the port and watch men work. This is the great free pleasure of Livorno and the thing I came back for. The ferries slide in and out, the dock is loud, everyone has somewhere to be and something on their shoulder, and it moves like a single organism, a hive with a thousand separate purposes that somehow add up to one. I could watch it for an hour and feel I’d done something with my morning. I spent a lot of that visit around Via Grande and the streets near Piazza Mascagni and Corso Mazzini, which is as close as Livorno comes to having a tourist quarter, which is to say not very close at all.

By lunch, the body wants what the city was built to feed it. Livornese food is sailor food and worker food, heavy and oily and hot with chili, built to put back what a hard morning takes out, and it is almost all from the sea. I will say plainly that Livorno is the best place I know in Italy to sit down and destroy whole plates of fish, and the reason is the obvious one: it is a port, and the thing on your plate was in the water that morning, sometimes still arguing about it an hour before. I was staying near Piazza Orlando, so I ate near there, the small fried things done simply, the triglie alla livornese baked in a sauce so red and sharp it stains the dish. I ate alone most of the trip, which is its own pleasure, a plate of fish and a glass of something cold, and no obligation to speak.

To illustrate the food, quickly, let me give you an analogy. In Pietrasanta, where I live, the seafood is also fresh like in Livorno. We have Viareggio, a smaller port, same harbor concept, you can’t get fish fresher than that. You eat what was alive minutes ago and got caught out at sea an hour ago. But here, we eat it simply. Grill them, fry them, or just raw like sushi. No frills. Minimalism. Plates look wonderful, almost like a minimalistic art form. Closer to the Japanese style of seafood eating. Now, in Livorno, well… I mean this in a very, very good way, but plates are enormous, often messy, there is sauce, massive spices, big bowls of everything, a kilo of bread is usual either on the food, in the food, or next to food, and the “deboning” is a concept that you have to ask for, it’s not normal. Where I live, you eat clean, you leave your table clean. In Livorno, your table looks like a massacre, and your hands feel as if you’ve just come out of the morgue.

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At night, alone and footsore after miles of the city, I learned the other thing Livorno has that almost nowhere else in Italy does. A good old pub. Not the word, the thing. In most of this country, people drink in cafés or in soft, pretty bars, and the British or German idea of a proper public room with good beer and food, and working people leaning on the bar, simply isn’t part of the culture. Livorno is the exception, because Livorno has the one ingredient that makes a pub a pub, which is a serious quantity of people who have worked all day and want to sit down hard. I found my bar near the same piazza and went back to it. Good beer, decent wine, and, improbably, a kitchen that turned out a plate of octopus that had no business being that good in a place you go mainly to drink.

There is, I should say, almost nothing to see in Livorno, in the museum sense, and I mean that as praise. There is the flat where Modigliani was born, a small Venetian-style fortress, and an aquarium. You can skip all of it without loss. The one thing worth seeing is the central market and the web of canals around it, and you’ll walk into those anyway if you simply walk, which is the only correct way to be in this city. I happened to be there on a weekend, so the streets behind the cathedral were filled with an open market, and I stood in it eating something off a paper and watched Livorno sell things to itself, which is the only audience it has ever really cared about.

And that, finally, is what the city has to offer, the whole of it, the thing that made me quietly in love on the first afternoon and keeps me coming back. Livorno is alive. For the person passing through, Florence is an open-air museum. Venice is a theme park with admission. Rome is the backdrop of a film about Rome. All of those cities are genuinely alive, too, of course, from the inside, for the people who actually live their days in them, but for the traveler, they have learned to hide their ordinary lives behind the glamour, to perform the version you came to see.

Livorno does not perform. It has no fucking time for that. None. Zero time for bullshit. You come here, you get on your ferry, you eat our food, you move. You are probably in someone else’s way anyway. The city is working. It is moving. It is feeding its own. You are welcome to watch, and it will be friendly to you while you do, loud and quick and warm, but it will not slow down or dress up or pretend to be anything other than the hard, salt, living thing it is.

On the last morning, I had the black coffee and the too-sweet pastry again, standing at the counter. I even ordered my coffee with amaro in it. I put my coat on, knowing that I would go to my car, leave the city for Pietrasanta, and for a second, I stupidly expected someone to say “great to see you” or something. But no, of course not, Livorno doesn’t care.

The menu is a list of dishes. The meal is something else.

I have been eating in Versilia for years now, and I still get small things wrong. I correct myself, mostly, by watching the table next to me. The Italian table is a teacher if you sit close enough.

Here is what I have learned, in the order you will need it.

1. The arrival is the first decision

Lunch in Italy is on time. If a place opens at twelve, Italians are seated by twelve or twelve-thirty, and the kitchen is ready to feed them. Lunch has a window of roughly twelve to two-thirty in most of the country, slightly longer in tourist towns, and the staff opens the door already moving.

Dinner is the opposite. Italians do not eat early, and the kitchen knows this. A restaurant that opens at seven is not actually open at seven. The lights are on, the bread basket is on the table, the vino della casa is being poured for the one or two foreigners (like us) who showed up because their guidebook said dinner starts at seven, and the kitchen is still cleaning the lunch surfaces. Real service starts around eight. If you arrive at seven, you sit and wait, and the wait is longer than it should be, and you blame the restaurant. The restaurant is not the problem. You are early.

The fix is to arrive after eight. Eight-thirty is better. Nine is fine. Same kitchen, same staff, same menu, but now they are on a dinner rhythm, and you will eat a different meal for it.

2. Antipasto for one. Primo to share. Secondo for one.

The Italian table moves in courses, but the courses do not behave the way a foreigner expects.

The antipasto is yours. A plate of salumi, a bruschetta, a small bowl of olives, and a caprese. Each person orders one, or the table orders a few, and they are passed around as starters, but each plate is its own thing.

The primo, very often, is shared. A plate of tordelli al ragù arrives in the middle of the table, and three forks descend on it. Then the pici cacio e pepe arrives, three more forks. Italians eat half-portions of pasta this way constantly. The primo is the social course. It is also the carb-controlling course, though no Italian would put it that way.

The secondo is yours again. Whole grilled fish, a piece of meat, the fritto misto. Nobody is reaching across the table for your branzino. If you are hungry, order the contorno, the side dish. It is totally normal that the main dish arrived a bit naked, no sides. Most Italians don’t order sides. Remember, they’ve already had their carbs on the primo.

The dolce is sometimes shared, sometimes not. By that point, everyone is paying attention to the conversation again and not to the rules.

3. Why Italians eat four courses and stay in shape

This is the question every foreigner asks within the first month. Five answers, in roughly this order of importance.

The ingredients. A Tuscan tomato is a Tuscan tomato. The bread is made from local flour, the olive oil is from the hill across the road, and the pecorino comes from forty kilometers away. The food is not engineered for shelf life. It does not have the calorie density of a country that ships its produce six thousand miles. The Italian identity is not national, since the nation itself is new (at least by European standards). It is regional, or even more so, hyperlocal. And one of the greatest parts of that local identity is the local cuisine. People give gold medals for their local meat-filled tortelli, and purposefully call it tordelli, instead of tordelli. Almost every Italian stereotype is a marketing trick, starting with dolce vita, but the food is real.

Olive oil. Italians cook in olive oil. Everything. Not butter, not seed oil, not the industrial blends that fry the average restaurant meal in the rest of the world. Olive oil is still calories, plenty of them, but the body does something different with them. Four years here will convince you. The mirror does not lie. And yes, olive oil is local too, no fake. That’s for export for those who can’t tell the difference between fresh and late harvest oil.

The order. Despite Italy being the country the world associates with pizza and pasta, Italians do not eat carbs the way the world thinks they do. Pasta arrives in the middle of the meal, in a smaller portion than you would get at any pasta chain in Toronto or Berlin, and it is often shared. The protein comes after, usually unaccompanied by anything heavy. A grilled fish with a wedge of lemon. A tagliata with rocket and a few shavings of parmigiano. The vegetables show up as their own small course, not as a starch buffet. Oh, and almost all primo dishes are extremely minimalistic. 5 ingredients, and I counted oil and salt in. Your fettuccini alfredo with cream, butter, cheese, chicken (with chlorine and antibiotics, yikes), and god knows how many spices? Not happening here.

The walk. After dinner, Italians walk. The best restaurants are in the center of the towns, where you can’t go by car anyway. So, at the bare minimum, you walk back to your car. The passeggiata is its own subject. The walk is the second half of the meal. There is also a deep digestive culture in drinks. An amaro, a grappa, a limoncello in the south. These are not nightcaps. They are tools. The Italian relationship with digestion is closer to traditional Chinese medicine than to Western dietetics. The body is being helped along.

The day around the meal. Breakfast is a coffee and a cornetto, eaten at a bar counter in three minutes. Lunch is light unless it is Sunday. There is almost no snacking culture, no street food in the American sense, no second-breakfast or mid-afternoon pretzel. The big dinner is the day’s actual meal. The other meals make room for it. Longevity and blue zone maniacs would call this intermittent fasting, maybe. Italians call it Thursday.

Eating out is not special. One of the main surprises for me when I moved here was the complete lack of at-home kitchen culture. If you ask me, I’m with Team America here. Everyone should have a big-ass kitchen with multiple appliances and an outrageously long countertop. In Italy, it’s pretty rare. There are many reasons for this, but one is that Italians love to go out to eat. The weather is perfect, the restaurants are amazing, and everyone is mega-social. Eating out is common. It’s not a special day, not a celebration, not a unique day in the month. It’s a Thursday. So no one overcompensates or overconsumes. No one eats or drinks too much. They are there for each other, not for the food.

4. The house wine is fine

Italy is one of the few countries on the planet where you can order the vino della casa without thinking about it and be safe ninety-nine times out of a hundred. France maybe. After that, the list gets short.

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The waiter will ask sparkling or still, frizzante o naturale, and red or white. White with fish, red with meat. A mezzo litro di rosso della casa costs five or ten euros and arrives in a small carafe that has been refilled in that restaurant for thirty years. It is not a wine list, it is the wine the place pours every day. Of course, if you are into wine, you can check the wine list. It is usually 10 times heavier and thicker than the menu itself. And yes, Italians can literally argue with each other for very long minutes on which wine they should drink at their table. It’s hilarious to watch.

5. Don’t order everything at once

The other foreign reflex: arrive, sit, scan the menu, order four courses in one shot, ask the waiter to bring it all out. This compresses an evening into thirty-five minutes and ruins the whole architecture.

The golden rule of an Italian dinner is to give everything time. Order the antipasti first. Eat them. Drink some wine. When the plates are cleared, talk to the waiter about the primi. Order, eat, drink, talk. Then the secondi. The meal is a four-act structure, not a four-hour buffet. The kitchen wants to cook each course freshly. If you compress, the food suffers, and so does the conversation.

A proper dinner runs three to four hours. A long one, five. This is not slow service. This is service.

6. Don’t ask for tap water

Italian tap water is fine. You can drink it. Nobody is going to get sick. Asking for it at a restaurant is rude anyway.

The reason is structural. There is no tipping in Italy. The restaurant makes its margin on the basics: the coperto, the bread, the drinks (wine), and the water. A bottle of acqua minerale costs two or three euros, and the restaurant marks it up. That two-euro margin is part of how the restaurant pays the dishwasher. Asking for tap water is, in effect, asking the restaurant to lose its margin on you while you sit at one of their tables for two and a half hours. It reads as cheap and as foreign, and it is one of the most reliable ways to be marked as a tourist within twelve seconds of sitting down.

Order the bottled water. Two-fifty, four-fifty, whatever. Frizzante or naturale. Move on.

7. Don’t break the rules

If you spend a hundred euros to fly somewhere and a thousand to sleep there, the absolute minimum is to eat the way the locals eat. The Italian relationship with food has had several hundred years to find its shape. Probably, they know how to eat their pasta better than you do.

A short list of the breakages I see most often:

There is no caffè latte on the menu. A latte is a glass of milk. If you want what you mean, the word is cappuccino (more milk) or macchiato (less milk). There are no flavored coffees. No vanilla, no caramel, no pumpkin spice. The only acceptable adulteration is the corretto, espresso with a shot of grappa or sambuca, and that is a man at a bar at ten in the morning, not you, not at dinner.

You do not put cheese on anything with fish in it. The spaghetti alle vongole is already salted by the sea. Cheese on top breaks the dish. Some Sicilian and Sardinian preparations break this rule, but they break it deliberately, and you will know because the cheese arrives on the plate from the kitchen.

You do not ask for ketchup. The condiments at the table are olive oil, salt, pepper, and maybe vinegar. That is the kit.

Yes, to most of these rules, some would say, “But I’m the customer, and I get whatever the f—k I want,” or “I paid for it.” I, on the other hand, would say I respect Texan pitmasters that much that I would never ask for a dip or sauce before I taste the brisket. And in Britain, I would never order that ribeye well-done and ask for a bottle of ketchup. I mean, I could, I paid for it, so I could even ask for mayo instead of ketchup and pretend to be French, just to be sure that my ass will be kicked out of the pub.

8. Ask the waiter

The single highest-leverage move at an Italian restaurant is to ask the waiter what is good today. Italian waiters are not the harassed gig workers of the Anglo-American restaurant economy. Many of them have worked the same dining room for ten or twenty years. They know the kitchen, they know the season, they know what the boat brought in this morning, and they have strong opinions about all of it.

Ask. Cosa mi consiglia? What do you recommend? C’è qualcosa di stagione? Anything in season? Il pesce di oggi qual è? What is today’s fish?

Then trust the answer. If they tell you the cinghiale is good this week because hunting season just opened, eat the cinghiale. If they say the carciofi are in and the kitchen is doing them alla romana, eat the carciofi. The seasonal dish is on the menu for a reason, usually because the chef is excited about it, and an excited chef cooks better than a bored one.

9. The dishes you know are not the dishes here

Almost everything you grew up calling Italian is not Italian. Or it is, but in a form so distant that the original would not recognize it.

Carbonara has no cream. It is eggs, guanciale (not bacon, not pancetta), cheese, and black pepper. That is the whole thing. The cream version is a French simplification that took over the world.

Fettuccine Alfredo does not exist in Italy. It exists in one restaurant in Rome that serves it to tourists who have flown in to find it.

Spaghetti and meatballs is not a dish. Polpette exist, spaghetti exist, but they are not served together. They were combined by Italian-Americans in New York to stretch the meat budget.

Bolognese is not a red sauce poured over pasta. It is ragù, slow-cooked for hours, served with tagliatelle, never spaghetti, in proportions where the pasta is the main event and the meat is the seasoning.

Mozzarella rarely goes on pasta. Garlic-bread crust is not on any pizza in Italy. Pineapple, we will not discuss.

Trust me when I tell you this: anytime I travel to England, one of the first things I order is a double pepperoni-and-cheese NY-style pizza with a cheese-filled crust, and I have it with wings on the side. Garlic butter dips. Plural. It’s not a thing here. And I am saying this with a straight face, even though we have a pizzeria under our apartment where Alessandro makes the best Neapolitan pizza in the entire region. If I were to ask him to put cheese in the crust, I'm not sure I would be served like, ever again.

10. Don’t order the burger

The fact that you can’t get your dreamy Italian dishes, because they don’t exist, is true the other way around as well. Italians, generally, have no idea about international cuisine. If you are an Italian reading this, I don’t mean to offend you. But… I’ve seen hamburger on the menu thousands of times, and I can count on only one of my hands how many times I've had at least close to the notion of what a hamburger should be.

But this is normal. If you want a real taco, you go to Mexico or to a stand near the border run by someone called Sancho. If you want a real steak with the right potatoes and the right ale, you go to a British/Irish/Scottish pub. If you want a smash burger, you go to New York. There are exceptions. There are obsessive chefs, and there are places run by foreigners as well. The best Japanese place I know in Genova is run by a Jap chef. He is the only one who could make proper ramen within a 200 km radius. I still couldn’t find a good American BBQ, let me tell you (even though there is an entire chain here in Italy, they think they cook Texan food…).

So when you sit down at a restaurant in Italy, do not order the burger, the ribs, the tacos, or the pad thai. Even if they are on the menu. The Italian trattoria is one of the best places to eat on the planet, but only if you order what it is for.

The last thing.

There is no tipping. I know I have said this maybe twice. I am saying it a third time because every American I have ever taken to dinner in Italy has tried to leave twenty percent on the table. The coperto covers the table. If you want to round up by a euro or two, fine. If the meal was extraordinary and you want to leave five, fine. Twenty percent is a mistake. The waiter will spend the next week telling the kitchen about the strange foreigner who tipped as if he were Enzo Ferrari.

I’m pretty sure Enzo never tipped, by the way.

Last week, we visited Lucca. A city that doesn’t care about your selfies, and that’s why it’s a much better choice for tourists than an overcrowded Florence or even Pisa.

We took a picture of a guy (see below). We met him in a hat shop, which I was looking for anyway, because I’m a big sucker for Italian fedoras (I collect Borsalino hats, one of the last remaining vices I have…). He came in to have a short chat with the owner. Two locals who knew each other. We didn’t buy a hat, but later we sat down at the main square’s bar, Café Casali, and there he was again. He ordered a glass of water and an espresso, sat down, and smoked a toscanello for an hour. Doing nothing. A Tuesday afternoon. He wore even his hat carelessly, halfway tilted.

As a foreigner, I thought: this is very Italian, this is the dolce far niente, the sweetness of doing nothing. But it’s because I’m a foreigner that I think this way. I turn it into an identity thing. For him, it was a Tuesday.

Italian identity is hyper-local. Ask an American to tell you about themselves, and they start with what they do, the job, the work as identity. They might talk later about where they grew up, what they ate there, and so on. Ask someone near the Mediterranean, and they start from the opposite direction: I grew up in Lucca, still live here, I love this dish, I don’t trust people from Pisa. You learn what they do for a living by accident, weeks later. Identity here is the food, the dialect, the town, the city-state mind that has run for a thousand years. Yes, I know, Italy is a unified country now, but that’s barely over 150 years (165 now) of nationhood, after thousands of years of city-states…

Oh, and the dolce far niente? The phrase itself didn’t come from Italians making a philosophy of their afternoons. It became a famous thing during the Grand Tour Era, when northern European lords came south and found the way of living down here irresistible. 16th to 19th century, you know, when the Spanish, Dutch, and British did their empire things, getting rich doing so, so they started visiting countries for leisure, like Italy. And in Italy, they saw Italians aristocracy financing art (Renaissance), and aside from some minor wars between cities, they were busy doing nothing. Meanwhile, Northerners, accustomed to managing an empire, were amazed at how elegantly this could be done in Italy. They needed a name for it because they didn’t have one. Back home, everyone was high on the industrial revolution, trade, and empire, and here were people watching the sunset with a glass of wine after a day’s work. So they took the phrase home as something to envy. Maybe Byron named it first in a letter, and this is how it got sticky.

Back to my point: nothing is faker than dolce far niente. My guy had his cigar in silence. But the waitress worked her shift to support the doing-nothing. Someone made the coffee. The foreigners who romanticized Italy saw rich men idle in their palazzi. They did not see the Maremma herders who made the beef, or the Chianti growers who made the wine for the evening, all of them working, then and now, because the food here tastes the way it does only because someone keeps doing the thousand-year-old work by hand. And the reason a certain kind of Italian can sit and do nothing is the same reason: the money was made, the empire run, the city-states won, centuries before most of Europe and long before America existed. The Romans, the Medici, the Doges, the Pope, and the Papal States. Old money sits easy.

Yet everyone is hyped about doing nothing.

It shouldn’t take a cigar, an espresso, and an hour in a piazza without your phone for a man to feel he’s allowed to stop. I’m not even sure my guy had a phone. We shouldn’t build a mythology around it, or fly to another country to be granted permission for it.

It should be just a Tuesday afternoon.

Alla prossima,

Peter

Pietrasanta, 24 May 2026

What’s new on our site: terme all the way

We are busy building something amazing for our readers, so we published less this week. Also, probably not the best timing for it, but we wrote some articles about thermal baths. We are originally Hungarians, so we have deep roots in thermal spa culture, which, as with most cultural things in Europe, is, of course, a product of the Romans (then adopted by the Turks, from whom we Hungarians got it).

Summer is, again, not the best timing for this, but we wrote about Montecatini and San Giuliano here:

Next week, we will launch some pretty good stuff. The epic collection of 1,000 best towns in Italy that you need to visit. Italy has around 8,000 towns. You know maybe 50 of them. We bring you the rest.

We had colder winters in Hungary, real ones, the kind that go well below zero and stay there for weeks, and I thought I knew what cold was. Then we moved to the marina and learned the other kind. It is only ten or twelve degrees here in the depth of winter, nothing a Hungarian should respect, but the wind comes off the water with nothing to stop it, and the sky goes the flat grey of a closed shop, and the damp gets into you in a way the dry Budapest freeze never did. When that sky arrives, it means two things in our house. A big pot of bollito, or any soup that takes the whole afternoon. And a thermal bath.

The problem is finding one. We are surrounded by hotels, because this is Italy and because we live on the coast, but a hotel with a real thermal operation is a different animal: not one sad pool, but the whole apparatus, multiple pools at different temperatures, the salt pool, sauna, steam room, mud therapy, massage, the entire game. We wrote about …

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