This is not actually the case in Lucca. There were people. There are always people in Lucca. But on a cold February Tuesday, the people in Lucca are Lucchesi, going about their day, and not the buses from Florence and the cruise excursions from Livorno that run through the historic center between April and October. We walked Via Fillungo down to the Piazza dell’Anfiteatro, the elliptical square that an architect named Lorenzo Nottolini, whose other major work is the Chain Bridge at Fornoli, which we have written about before, laid out on the foundations of the old Roman amphitheater in the early nineteenth century. The square is the shape of the arena. The shops in the curve are in what used to be the stalls. We sat on a stone bench and Sophia ordered an espresso from a bar with three tables and two of them empty, and the woman behind the counter, who was about sixty and had her hair done in the way that Lucchese women have their hair done, asked where we were from, and when I said Hungary and Sophia said Pietrasanta she nodded and corrected the order to un caffè e un caffè macchiato, because she had decided which of the two of us drank what. She was right. That was our first conversation with a Lucchese.

I want to tell you what makes Lucca different from every other city in Tuscany, and to do that, I need to take a small detour through the question of photography.

If you take a picture in Venice, anyone can tell you are in Venice. If you take a picture in front of the Florence Duomo, anyone can tell you are in Florence. The Pisa tower, obviously, is the Pisa tower. Rome has the Castel Sant’Angelo, the Colosseum, and twenty other things that are not the Colosseum. Siena has the Campo. San Gimignano has the towers. The whole modern tourist economy of these cities runs on the fact that the city has a single iconic image, and the image can be reproduced on a postcard, on an Instagram, on a refrigerator magnet, and the visitor goes there and stands in front of the image and takes the picture, and the picture proves the visit, and the visit, in some accounting, is justified.

Lucca does not have this. Lucca has nothing photographable. The walls are four kilometers long and remarkable, but when you take a picture of yourself on top of them, you could be on any park promenade in Europe. The Piazza dell’Anfiteatro is beautiful, but its beauty is only legible from above, which means from a drone or from the top of a tower, neither of which is how a normal visitor encounters it. The Torre Guinigi has those holm oaks growing on top of it, which is a wonderful thing, but you have to know what you are looking at, and you cannot include the trees in a photograph of yourself standing under the tower because they are forty-five meters above you. The Cattedrale di San Martino is a fine asymmetric Romanesque cathedral that looks, in a photograph, like every other fine asymmetric Romanesque cathedral. The Volto Santo, the medieval crucifix that has been venerated here since 742 and that draws pilgrims even now, is a small, dark thing inside a small, dark chapel and is impossible to photograph in any way that means anything to anyone outside the religion. There is no one image of Lucca. You can take a thousand photographs in Lucca, and none of them, on their own, will tell anyone you have been in Lucca.

This is, I have come to believe over the years that we have been visiting, the secret of the city. Lucca is unrepresentable, and because it is unrepresentable, it has been spared the fate that has befallen everywhere else.

I will give you an example of what I mean. If you fly to Florence to spend three days in Tuscany, you will be told to take a day trip to Pisa. Everyone takes a day trip to Pisa. The reason for the day trip to Pisa is the tower, and the reason for the tower is that it leans, and the reason for the leaning is poor medieval foundations, and the entire economy of the day trip is the picture in which the tourist appears to be holding the tower up with one hand. The tower itself is not special. There are many others like it elsewhere in Italy. But none of them are leaning. None of them is presentable as an Instagram picture. There is a small mercy, by the way, in the fact that the tower does not stand in the dead center of Pisa. It stands in the Campo dei Miracoli on the northern edge of the city, separated from the Arno and the inner streets by a stretch of suburban sprawl. The tourists go to the Campo, take the picture, and most of them never see the rest of Pisa at all, leaving the inner city around the Arno mostly to the Pisani. Even if they do visit Pisa, they are off by the evening, so the evenings are special for the people in Pisa. The city itself is theirs again. If you have only one day, and you cannot stand the thought of standing in line to pretend to hold up an eight-hundred-year-old building, the alternative thing every guidebook will tell you to do, and rightly so, is to go to Lucca instead. (Unrelated, but if you want to see Venice properly, stay a couple of nights inside the city. 90% of the tourists who think Venice is a theme park leave the city by evening, so by night, you have the city for yourself. It becomes alive, magical, and very local after 9 pm.)

The Lucchesi will not thank me for telling you this. Lucca is what travelers who came to see Pisa wish Pisa were. It is small enough to walk around in a day, contained within the most beautifully preserved city walls in Europe, at four point two kilometers, layered with churches and palazzi from every century since Rome, full of bars where the espresso costs one euro, and the woman behind the counter will correct your order. You can walk into Lucca through one of the gates, spend six hours, walk out, drive to Florence in an hour, and you will have seen something that you cannot put in a photograph, and that will, for that very reason, stay with you. Almost every friend or family member we have recommended go to Lucca has said the very same thing: it’s much better than Pisa from a tourist's POV.

Now to the part of Lucca that took us longer to understand.

There is a thing about this city which I did not see on the first visit, or the third. I came from Hungary, where the great architecture you see in Budapest is the leftover of an empire that ended after WW1, and the buildings are dusty, and the families who built them mostly fled or were dispossessed twice in the twentieth century, by the Nazis and then by the Communists, and what you see is residue. I lived in London for years, where the great architecture is the visible result of an empire that ended only in living memory and that still has its Lord So-and-So and its country estates and its ancestral money, but London’s empire shine is on the surface of the buildings and the families inside them are reduced now to the National Trust tour and the photogenic spaniel. Lucca looks, when you walk it, like a city in which the money never left.

The Medici did not conquer Lucca. The Medici conquered everyone else. They took Pisa in 1406, Siena in 1555, Volterra by force in 1472, and they ended up running a Grand Duchy of Tuscany that absorbed every important Tuscan city except this one. The Republic of Lucca, alone among the medieval Tuscan republics, survived continuously from 1160 to 1799, six hundred and thirty-nine years, until Napoleon ended it. The reason Lucca survived is not, as the postcards imply, the walls. The walls are real and remarkable, but they were never used in a war. The only time the gates of Lucca were ever closed in earnest was on November 18, 1812, when the Serchio flooded. They bolted the doors and packed mattresses against them to keep the water out, and it worked.

The reason Lucca survived is that Lucca was rich, in the silk trade and in banking, and rich in a particular careful Lucchese way that did not produce conquerors but produced merchants. And the merchants did the sensible thing. They paid the Medici. Not in cash labeled as protection, but in tax and tribute and concessions and political alignment, century after century, formally as a sister republic, informally as a place that knew which way the wind was blowing. Florence got its money. Lucca kept its walls. And because Lucca was under the Medici umbrella, no one else dared touch Lucca either: the smaller signorie, the Modenese, the Genovese, the Pisani when they were independent, all knew that any move on Lucca would mean a move on Florence, and Florence was not someone you moved on. The walls of Lucca were never tested because Lucca had quietly arranged to be untouchable. This is not the heroic story, but it is the true one, and it is why every brick of every palazzo from the fifteenth century is still standing today, still owned, in many cases, by the descendants of the men who paid for it.

I learned this most concretely on a trip to Villa Mansi in Capannori, about 5-10 kilometers north of the city walls of Lucca, where we went on my birthday, on a whim, by accident. Villa Mansi was originally built in the sixteenth century and was bought in 1675 by Ottavio Mansi, a silk merchant who had done very well, who renovated it in the high baroque style and laid out the gardens with a hydraulic park. The villa is open for tours. You buy a ticket. A young Englishman in a tweed-ish jacket comes to meet you, introduces himself, turns out he is the caretaker of the premises, and walks you through three centuries of frescoed rooms with a slight but real authority of someone who knows where every door leads. At the entrance, a huge Bernese Mountain Dog was sitting down in a patch of sunlight, watching us. The dog was called Leopoldo. The Englishman scratches his ears. He is the family’s, he says. The descendants of the original family still own the villa. They live upstairs, with a Bernese mountain dog, while a tweeded Englishman walks us, two Japanese men, and a British couple around through the staterooms of their summer house, three hundred and fifty years after the silk merchant bought it, and they have been doing some version of this for as long as anyone can remember. By the way, the family got rich hundreds of years ago because they stopped buying silk from China and started sourcing locally, cutting logistics costs and controlling the entire production line from silk to the finished dress. Just sayin’.

This is what I mean about Lucca. The history did not stop. The buildings are not preserved. The buildings are still in use, by the same families, in the same way, three centuries on. There are very few places left on earth where this is true at scale. Britain has it in pockets, but the great houses are mostly run by trusts now, and the families have migrated to flats in Chelsea. France has the châteaux of the Loire, but the families are usually quiet about it. Germany has its Schlösser and its lingering nobility, but the country has had a hard twentieth century and a careful relationship with its old aristocracy. Italy, surprisingly given everything, has more of this still alive than the rest of them, and Tuscany has more of it than the rest of Italy, and Lucca has more of it than the rest of Tuscany, and the reason Lucca has more of it than the rest of Tuscany is that the Medici did not come, and the Napoleonic period was brief, and the Risorgimento was kind to private property, and the world wars happened elsewhere, and Lucca, the city that bought its way out of every century, has the longest accumulated continuous money of any small city in Italy. Or in the world, maybe.

You feel this when you walk the streets. The shops on Via Fillungo are the brand-name shops of any prosperous European city, but the buildings they are in are five hundred years old, and the upper floors are still residential, and the residents are sometimes the descendants of the people who built the building. The bars are old and confident. The art galleries do not display tourist watercolors. The bookshops have actual books in them, and the woman behind the counter knows what is in the windows of the other bookshops on the street, and what each of them is missing, and where you can find what you want if she does not have it. The restaurants do not have menus in three languages. They have the same dishes their mothers cooked. Tordelli Lucchesi, which we mentioned in another piece — the small Lucchese half-moon ravioli stuffed with meat, dressed with a meat ragu, eaten in winter — is the local pasta, and you eat it at a table with a paper tablecloth in a room that has been a restaurant since before America existed. The wine is Lucchese, from the hills above the city. The Buccellato bread with anise and raisins is from Lucca specifically (the Sicilian buccellato is a different beast). Lucca has its own everything, in the way a place that was a republic for six and a half centuries can afford to have its own everything.

The first afternoon, in February, when we walked back out through the gate at sunset, the wind had picked up, and the light on the brick of the walls had gone a particular pink that I have only ever seen on Lucchese brick. Sophia said something I have remembered. She said: This is the only city we have been to in Italy where I would actually live. I knew what she meant. The other Italian cities are remarkable to visit and exhausting to live in. Florence is a museum that has not slept in forty years. Venice is dying in slow motion. Rome is glorious and unmanageable. Siena is a film set that closes at six. Lucca is the city you could walk into on a Tuesday in February and rent a flat above a bookshop and become, slowly, over a few decades, a Lucchese.

We did not. We live in Pietrasanta. But we go back, often, and most often in the off-season, when the city is what it always is — small, prosperous, slightly amused by the world, and impossible to photograph.

The Lucchesi prefer it that way. They paid for it.

This is a ski village in August. This is the part of Italy nobody talks about, because nobody is here.

Sophia and I had come up to Abetone for our wedding anniversary, which falls in the middle of August, which is the worst possible time to be in Pietrasanta, where we live. Versilia in mid-August is forty degrees and full of tourists, the spiagge libere are taken from sunrise, the parking is impossible, the restaurants are booked three days out, and the air does not move. So we had done what we had learned to do: go in the opposite direction from everyone else. We had booked three nights at a spa hotel in the Val di Luce, two and a half hours up into the mountains north of Pistoia, at around fourteen hundred meters, where in winter the entire region puts on its skis and in August the entire region forgets the place exists.

Italy has three kinds of mountains for skiing, and an Italian will tell you about all three at length if you let them. There are the Alps proper, in the northwest, in the Valle d’Aosta, the serious mountains pressing up against France and Switzerland, where Cervinia and Courmayeur sit under the Matterhorn and the Mont Blanc. If you are from Europe, you would say: it’s practically Swiss-France, but they speak Italian and serve pizza, instead of fondue. There are the Dolomites, in the northeast, near the Austrian border, the famous ones, the pale ones, where the wealthy Italian families have their second houses, and the shopping streets carry Bulgari and Gucci alongside the ski rental. Again, if you are from Europe, this is basically Austria, red geraniums on the balconies, and next to your schnitzel, you can order, you’ve guessed it: Italian food. And then there is the Apennine spine, running down the middle of the country, where central Italy does its skiing without any of the postcard reputation of the other two: Abruzzo for the Romans, Mount Amiata for southern Tuscany, and here at the top of the Pistoiese mountains, on the border with Modena, Abetone for the Tuscans. Fifty kilometers of pistes, seventeen lifts, and the largest ski area in central Italy. The Appenines are the most Italian ones, at least in style, you just simply can’t compare them to anything else. None of this matters in August.

Hungarians know skiing. We do not have skiable mountains of our own, not really, but we have the Austrian Alps two hours from Budapest, and Hungarian families with any disposable income at all spend a week every winter at one of the smaller Austrian resorts, eating Wiener schnitzel and Germknödel, drinking Jägertee with rum and snaps, watching Austrian children at three years old already in their first ski school, racing each other down the children’s slope with the particular Austrian seriousness that treats skiing the way the English treat queuing or the Japanese treat tea. I am not a skier. Sophia thinks she is and is not. But we know the rhythm of these places in winter: the morning rush at the lifts at nine, the lunch at the rifugio at noon with polenta and ragu and a glass of wine in the sun, the slow exhausted descent at four when the light goes gold on the slope, the bombardini and the mulled wine in the bar at six, dinner at eight, sleep at ten. We know the Italian version, too, which is softer. Italians ski like Italians do everything else, which is to say with a slight insistence on style and a slight indifference to mastery. The clothes matter more than the technique. The table at lunch is longer than the entire hütte in Austria. The wine is better, obviously. The cigarette breaks are longer. Let’s just say if there’s any style in skiing, it’s probably because of Italians.

None of that exists in August. In August, the lift does not move. The bar is closed. The rental shop has a sheet of A4 paper in the window saying vediamo in dicembre. The piste, which in February is a busy ribbon of color and noise and Lycra, is a green field on a hill, and a single horse is standing in it.

We had driven up two days earlier from Pietrasanta. The route is one of the small pleasures of living where we live, because for two and a half hours, you are not on a motorway at all. We took the SS12 inland from Lucca, climbed up through Bagni di Lucca, where I have written before about the chain bridge and the Devil’s Bridge, and kept going north along the Lima river instead of cutting east toward Florence. The road follows the river, then peels away from it at Pianosinatico, and starts climbing in earnest. The chestnut woods that line the lower valley give way to beech, and the beech to fir, and then you are in real mountains, and the temperature on the dashboard reads cooler with every five minutes, and Sophia, who had been complaining about the heat in Pietrasanta for a week, opened her window and said, audibly, ah.

San Marcello Pistoiese passes on the way, then Cutigliano, both of them villages worth stopping in, both of them more medieval than the resort towns higher up. Cutigliano in particular, with its Palazzo Pretorio from 1377, the old seat of the Captains of the Mountain who governed the upper valley for the Republic of Pistoia, the carved stone coats of arms of every captain who ever served are stuck into the wall of the building like a book of names. We stopped, walked the streets, drank a coffee in the small piazza, and watched two old men play cards. Cutigliano in August is not empty the way the high resorts are. It has its own life, the way a real village has its own life, the August silence of an Italian small town with the shutters half-down and the cats asleep on the warm stones. We did not stay. We drove on.

From Cutigliano, the road climbs steeply through fifteen kilometers of forest, and you do not pass any villages until Abetone proper, at the high pass at thirteen hundred eighty-eight meters. Abetone is a different kind of place. It was founded in 1732 as a customs post, the Granducato di Toscana on one side and the Duchy of Modena on the other, the road over the Apennines that connected Tuscany to the Emilian plain and then north to Mantua and Vienna. The name comes from a single enormous fir, an abete, which had to be cut down to put the road through. They left two stone pyramids in the village square, one for each duchy, with the coats of arms of Pietro Leopoldo and Francesco III facing each other across the road. The pyramids are still there. We walked past them twice on our second evening, in the cool air after dinner, and both times nobody else was looking at them.

The hotel was a spa resort up in the Val di Luce, the Valley of Light, which used to be called the Valley of Pools because in summer, when the snow above melts, two small lakes come out of hiding in the upper meadow, the Lago Nero and the Lago Piatto, both of them frozen over from December to March. The hotel was open because there was a small conference, which is the kind of thing that keeps a high-altitude Italian hotel running between seasons. The hotel had an outdoor pool fed by warmer water than the air, and a steam room, and an indoor pool, and a restaurant that did not have many guests at any meal, which meant we got the table by the window every time, the one looking down the valley. The food was hearty mountain food, the kind the rifugi serve at lunch in winter and which most Italian restaurants on the coast in August do not really do. Tagliatelle with hare ragu. Polenta with mushrooms and a slice of cheese melted on top. A peposo of beef cooked for six hours with whole peppercorns and red wine, the way the men who fired the brick kilns at Impruneta apparently used to cook it in the fifteenth century. We slept ten hours. We were the only people in the steam room every morning.

But the village. The village is what I want to tell you about, because the village in summer is a thing I had not seen before. Abetone in August is a strange architectural specimen. It is not, like Cutigliano or San Marcello, a village that existed before skiing came and continues to exist around it. Abetone is the skiing. The village was built for the skiers. The hotels are ski hotels, the bars are après-ski bars, the shops sell ski equipment and ski clothes, and the streets are wide because the buses that bring skiers up in winter need to turn around. In August, all of this is shut. The hotel facades have their wooden shutters down. The ski shops have a sign in the window. The pizza place is open on Saturdays only. There is one bar that serves coffee from ten to four, and that is the entire commercial life of the place. The streets are wide and empty. The light is alpine, white, and slightly thin. A woman walks a dog. A delivery truck reverses with its beeper sounding loud against the silence. The customs pyramids stand in the middle of it all, two and a half centuries old, indifferent to the seasons.

This is, I came to understand on our second morning, a kind of Italy you cannot see in the seasons for which it was built. In winter, Abetone is not Abetone. In winter, Abetone is a working machine, the lifts moving, the snow groomed, the rifugi serving, the bars full, the restaurants doing four sittings, the stylishly dressed Florentines and Pistoian families in their good ski jackets walking up the main street with their gloves off and their ski boots clicking on the asphalt. In August, Abetone is the body of the village without the activity, and what you see when you walk it slowly, with no one else around, is what kind of place was actually built here. The wood. The stone. The way the church is set against the hillside. The two pyramids. The long view down the valley toward the Tuscan side and the long view the other way toward the Emilian. You see the bones.

We walked everywhere. We did the path up to the Lago Nero in Val di Luce one afternoon, two hours up through fir and pine, the lake itself small and dark and held inside a bowl of rock, with no one else there, no boats, no swimmers, just the wind in the trees and our breath when we stopped to drink water. We had lunch at a rifugio that was open. We had a big plate of gnocco fritto and prosciutto and a glass of Lambrusco from just over the pass, because we were already in Modena territory and the food register had shifted accordingly. The man who ran the rifugio was bored. He talked to us for an hour. He told us nobody comes up here in August except the bikers, and even they go to Livigno or to the Dolomites because the bike trails there are bigger.

I want to tell you something I have come to believe about Italy after living here for a few years now. There are not many countries on earth where you can be in real mountains in the morning and in the sea by lunch. New Zealand can do it. Chile, in places. A few corners of Spain. Lebanon. Italy can do it almost anywhere along the Apennine spine, particularly along the Tuscan stretch. From the door of our hotel in the Val di Luce that week, we were ninety minutes from the Pietrasanta beach. We were two hours from Florence. We were forty-five minutes from Pistoia, an hour from Lucca, three hours from Bologna, and four from Rome. There were twenty-five degrees and clean, cold air in our valley, and there were forty degrees on the umbrella beach where we live. The Lago Nero had ten people walking around it in a day. The beach below our apartment had ten thousand. The price difference was significant in the same direction as the people difference.

Most Italians do not know this, in the working sense of know, which means they do not act on it. They have been brought up to believe that August is the beach, that the mountains are for January, that going to a ski resort in summer is like going to a stadium without a match. The hotels reinforce the rule by closing. The restaurants reinforce it by closing. The lifts reinforce it by stopping. The rule produces itself, and nobody questions it, and the result is that for the entire month of August, while half of Europe is sweating on the same forty-kilometer stretch of Tyrrhenian coast, the most beautiful and accessible mountain country in the country sits empty under a perfect sky, with two pyramids in a piazza, two lakes in an upland meadow, and a horse standing in a green ski piste with no idea what it normally is.

We drove home on a Sunday morning, slowly, down the same road we had come up. The temperature on the dashboard climbed two degrees for every two hundred meters of descent, and by the time we hit Bagni di Lucca it was thirty, and by Lucca it was thirty-five, and by Pietrasanta it stayed at there, and we drove the last ten kilometers with the windows shut and the air conditioning on and the sea visible in flashes between the umbrellas, and Sophia said, looking at it, we should not have come back yet.

Maybe we should not have. Maybe the secret of August in Italy is that you do not have to be where everyone else is. The mountains are open. The air is cool. The food is better. The rifugio man will talk to you for an hour because no one else has come in.

Since then, we try to spend our summers anywhere but near our beach.

Daniel is an old friend, also Hungarian, who is with me in Italy for a few days. Sophia, my wife, had taken a short trip elsewhere that weekend, and we were doing what men do when their better halves are not around to talk them out of it, which is preparing to grill a one-and-a-half-kilo bistecca alla fiorentina, the proper one, the T-bone the size of a tennis racket, the kind of slab you do not order for two in a restaurant because the waiter looks at you with concern. There is, near Aulla, an azienda agricola that does the best beef in this part of Tuscany, and that morning we drove up there and bought the steak, wrapped in butcher paper, heavy in the hand, and put it in the back of the car. Then I told Daniel about a thing I had read once, a small bridge in a town called Fornoli, near Bagni di Lucca, that looks almost exactly like the Chain Bridge in Budapest, and that since we had a steak that needed two days to spend in the fridge anyway, we might as well take the long way back, drive the inland road through the mountains, and stop wherever we felt like stopping. Daniel agreed in the way people agree to plans involving steak.

So we turned right out of the azienda, away from the coast, and pointed the car east toward Castelnuovo di Garfagnana, on the SS63 that climbs out of Aulla and threads itself into the Lunigiana. The road is not narrow. It is one of the main valley arteries through these mountains, two lanes most of the way, but it has its ups and downs and turns, and you do not drive it the way you drive an Italian motorway. You drive it the way you drive a road that was a mule track until 1850, which is what it was. Aulla itself we left behind in five minutes, the Brunella fortress on its hill above the town, four corners and a moat, the most powerful military structure in the Lunigiana for five hundred years.

Inside ten minutes, you are in a different climate. The light coming over the ridges is colder. The trees on the verge stop being the umbrella pines of the coast and become chestnuts, oaks, and hornbeam. There has been rain in the night, and wet leaves are pasted to the asphalt in the curves, and behind the leaves, there is loose dirt, and you slow down for that. There are no other cars. Or there are two cars in fifteen kilometers. The cars that do come are not the Fiat Pandas and the low-riding diesel hatchbacks of the Versilia plain. They are Toyota Hiluxes with mud on the wheels, old 4Runners with rifles in the back window, Jeeps with the dog in the passenger seat. The houses we pass are stone, and the stone is darker than the stone you see down on the coast, and the smoke coming out of every chimney is mixed with the smell of damp that lives in valleys that do not get enough sun in winter. If you squint just slightly and have ever been to Transylvania or a Bosnian village above Sarajevo, you will recognize the picture. Then a sign for woodfire pizza, or a hand-painted board outside a trattoria offering cinghiale (wild boar), and you remember which country you are in.

We stopped somewhere I cannot find again on a map, a small bar by the road in some frazione of some commune, the kind of place that has three plastic tables outside and a coffee machine inside with a lady behind it who has been operating it for thirty years. We had espresso standing up, the way you should. It was barely past noon. We were not in the business of finding a restaurant for pranzo, because at the azienda we had also bought a hard salami and a half kilo of prosciutto and a loaf of pane di montagna with the crust still warm, and as we left the bar Daniel went back in for two cans of Coke from the fridge, cold enough that the metal stuck to your hand for a second when you took them. Italians will tell you that Coke does not belong with prosciutto. Italians are right about most things. Not this one. We ate driving. The salami was thick and tasted of the woods. The Coke cut the fat. The bread crackled in the hand. We wiped our fingers on our jeans, since Sophia was not there to see, and that was lunch.

About an hour out from Aulla, the road bends one last time, and you see Castelnuovo di Garfagnana opening below you. I had passed close to here many times. I had been to Barga, the next town over, the one with the Scottish accent, because half its families emigrated to Glasgow in the nineteenth century and came back with their dialect bent. I had eaten the Garfagnana spelt and the chestnut flour and the local biroldo, the dark blood salami they make in this valley, in a hundred shops down on the coast where they sell it as imported from these mountains. But Castelnuovo itself I had never set foot in, and walking into it that afternoon, I understood at once why it had mattered, even before I knew anything about it.

The Rocca Ariostesca is grand in a way that the smaller mountain borghi are not grand. It dominates the Piazza Umberto I on one side, a hulking trapezoid of stone with a clock tower at its center and two small interior courtyards. The town sits at the confluence of two rivers, the Serchio and the Turrite Secca, and at the meeting point of two mountain systems, the Apuane to the south and the Apennines to the north, and at the crossing of the road that comes up the valley from Lucca and the road that comes over the pass from Modena. Whoever held Castelnuovo held the Garfagnana, and from the twelfth century onward, they all wanted to. The Lucchesi held it. Then, in 1316, Castruccio Castracani expanded the walls. Then the Estensi of Ferrara, who governed it as a province and, in 1522, sent up a poet named Ludovico Ariosto to be governor for three years while he was finishing the Orlando Furioso. Ariosto hated the job. He wrote letters to his duke begging to be recalled, complaining about the bandits in the woods, the murder rate, and the rain. The duke wrote back, saying, more or less, send us water from the baths and trout to pickle. The poet stuck it out. The fortress now bears his name. The bones of the fortress are the same bones, and the clock still works, and at the foot of the gate, there is a statue of Don Quixote that the commune commissioned for some reason in 2008, which I find I cannot explain.

What surprised me about Castelnuovo was the life in it. The mountain borghi we had been driving through all afternoon were silent, in that particular way that small Italian villages on a November day are silent, with their shutters half-down and their cats asleep on warm stones and one old man somewhere beating a rug. Castelnuovo was awake. There were young people sitting in the medieval piazza in the late afternoon light, drinking the local pale beer that is brewed here now, picking pieces of thick bread off a wooden board with thicker salami draped over them, the bread and the salami both made within five kilometers of where they were eating it. There was a market that had ended that morning, the iron frames of the stalls still being folded by two men in blue overalls. A child went past on a bicycle, fast, around the side of the fortress, and was gone. We did not eat in Castelnuovo. We had the steak in the trunk and a bridge to find.

From Castelnuovo the SS445 follows the Serchio south, and the river itself starts doing the work of the road, swinging the valley around its bends, and the high ridges of the Apuane to the west catch the late light, and we pass Barga sitting up on its hill to the left, and I tell Daniel about the Scottish thing, and we do not stop because we are losing the day, and at four-thirty we are in Fornoli.

Fornoli is a frazione of Bagni di Lucca. It sits where the Lima River comes down out of its valley and joins the Serchio. The bridge is two hundred meters past the train station. You park in a small lot and walk up, and there it is, the Ponte delle Catene, the Bridge of Chains, and Daniel and I both stopped a few meters short of it and laughed.

The Budapest Chain Bridge, the ‘Széchenyi lánchíd’, is the bridge every Hungarian schoolchild knows from the back of the old paper banknote. It crosses the Danube. It is four hundred meters long. It has two stone triumphal arches at each end, and the chains slung between them in two great long swags. It was built in 1849, designed by an English engineer named William T. Clark, and is grandiose in the way nineteenth-century imperial infrastructure is, meant to impress.

The Ponte delle Catene at Fornoli is the same bridge, only smaller, and not Hungarian. It crosses not the Danube but the Lima, which is a brown mountain torrent about eighty meters across at this point. It is fifty-some meters long. It has the same two stone arches, in the same neoclassical-imperial language, the same chains in the same swags, the same pedestrian deck. It was begun in 1840, completed in 1860, and designed by an Italian architect named Lorenzo Nottolini, who had been sent to England by the Duke of Lucca specifically to study the new English suspension bridges, and who came back having seen Clark’s Hammersmith Bridge in London. Nottolini built this one based on what he had seen. A few years later, Clark built Budapest based on the same family of designs. The two bridges are first cousins, separated by about a thousand kilometers and three hundred meters in length, built by men who had stood in the same architectural rooms in London in the 1830s and walked out with the same idea of what a suspension bridge should look like.

Daniel walked across, stopped in the middle, looked back at me, and said something in Hungarian about the world being smaller than we think. The bridge is dark, mossy at the base of the chains, the deck wood patched and re-patched, the stone of the arches stained where the water runs off the metal in winter. It is no longer used by cars.

We stayed for twenty minutes. The light went pink on the chains. A jogger crossed without slowing down. Then we got back in the car and drove up to Bagni di Lucca itself, two kilometers up the Lima, the old thermal town of the Lucchese nobility. Bagni was a serious place once. Byron came here. Shelley came here. Heinrich Heine, Robert Browning, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning came here. Half the hot springs of central Italy fed it, and half the upper class of Europe in the nineteenth century soaked in them. Now it is mostly quiet. A few of the old hotels still take guests. The casino building, which was the first licensed casino in Europe, opened in 1837, and sits empty. We walked the riverside for ten minutes, looked at the closed shutters of the grand villas across the water, looked at the empty bandstand in the small park where the orchestra used to play in summer, and then we drove back down. Bagni felt like a place keeping a secret it could no longer remember.

Out of Fornoli, the Serchio valley narrows again, and at the village of Borgo a Mozzano, you come around a bend, and the Devil’s Bridge is in the river in front of you. Ponte della Maddalena. In the eleventh century, it was founded by Matilda of Canossa. It was restored in the early fourteenth century by Castruccio Castracani because the old version was, according to the chronicler, “weakened by old age and rot.” Five arches, all of different sizes, the second one rising in a single high asymmetric hump above the others, donkey-backed, magnificent. The reason it is called the Devil’s Bridge is the usual reason. The master mason ran out of time. The Devil offered to finish it overnight for the soul of the first to cross. The master mason agreed and then, panicking, went to the priest, who told him to send a dog over first. The dog crossed. The Devil, cheated, threw himself into the Serchio and was never seen again. They say a white sheepdog still walks the bridge on the last evenings of October, looking for what it lost. I am not from a culture that believes in this, but standing at the foot of the bridge in the failing light of an early November afternoon, with the wind cold off the river and no one else around, I understood why someone would tell that story about that bridge. It does not look like something a person built. It looks like something someone helped build.

It is twenty minutes from the Devil’s Bridge into Lucca proper, and on the way down, with the valley opening into the Piana di Lucca, there is a place I have always loved for tordelli. It was not open that day, so we drove towards Lucca in the dark. The Serchio was a darker line in a dark valley, the lights of small frazioni passing on the right and the left, and somewhere around Ponte a Moriano the road broadens out and the streetlights begin and the radio finds itself again, and you are coming into a real city, with cars and bicycles and people and bars open and the walls of Lucca rising in front of you, four kilometers of them, brick and pink in the sodium light, the most beautiful intact city wall in Italy. Lucca deserves its own story, told properly, on its own terms, and I do not want to fold it into the end of a car ride.

We cooked the steak two days later, on a Sunday, on a charcoal grill on my terrace in Marina di Pietrasanta. It was very good. It was, I think, even better for having driven the long way to find it.

There is a thing about a road like this one. It does not lead anywhere you could not also reach faster. It does not pass through anywhere famous. It will not show up on a list. But it threads a country you do not see from the motorway, where the cars are different, and the houses are darker, and the food is older, and where the only difference between a magnificent fourteenth-century bridge with a story attached to it and a magnificent fourteenth-century bridge that ten million people a year photograph is whether somebody has yet decided to put up a sign.

And the steak, by the way, was rare in the middle, salt at the end, no oil. You should try it.

The drive-in tells you what you’ve done before the village does. From Aulla, you peel off the SS63, wind through Pallerone and Serricciolo, then the asphalt becomes patched, then patched again, then for stretches just held together by habit. It was October, so after heavy rain, there were leaves and dirt and small branches everywhere, and you go slowly because you have to, and because no one is behind you. There are no signs in English. There are no signs at all, really, beyond the white-on-blue commune markers, and at a certain altitude the radio loses its grip on whatever it had been playing and goes to static, and you turn it off and drive in the sound of the engine and the gravel and your own breathing.

Marciaso is a hundred people. Maybe fewer. As we described it to our friends: “We live in a village that has 80 people total, most of them are above 80 years old.” The borgo sits atop a hill in two concentric loops, the older houses higher, the rest set lower. There is one footpath that circles the old stone houses around what is left of a castello, which is mostly memory now, walls returning slowly to the ground. There is a place called Bar e Trattoria da Lino that opens only on weekends. There is a bus stop, and the bus comes two or three times a day (maybe), and goes down to civilization. There is a food truck that parks in front of the small church at the edge of the borgo once a week for three hours, selling salumi and cheese and a few shapes of fresh pasta. That is the village. That is what is there. Nothing else. Oh, and cats. Lots of cats. We also befriended some crows who were living in the old abandoned tower of the castle. I think you get the picture of how empty the place was and still is.

We had lived in palazzi before, and in apartment hotels, and in modern buildings in modern cities, and we are not the kind of people who pretend that hardship is romantic. There is nothing romantic in being poor, and there is nothing wrong with being well-off or above. The house had been renovated, which meant the air conditioning more or less heated and cooled, the walls were not, at that time, fully overtaken by mold (thankfully, only the outside), and the internet worked. The hot water was hot. There is a particular pride in writing those last sentences and meaning them as praise. I also reserved myself and haven’t used the word “mostly” much here, because we had some mold inside, the internet dropped when it rained a bit, the clouds totally overtook the sky, so ciao Starlink, and we’ve lost hot water due to electricity outages around 10 times. We also had fist-sized geckos and spiders everywhere.

But the terrace. From the terrace, the entire valley opened beneath us, the chestnut woods running down on every side, the farther ridges blue in the morning and grey by afternoon, and then, for ten minutes, pink before they became nothing. Our dog, who is gone now but was with us then, walked the loop of the borgo with us every morning and every evening, the same loop, the same houses, the same cats on the same walls. He liked it the way dogs like a thing they understand. We liked it the same way.

The region we had landed in is called the Lunigiana, and most Italians outside it could not point to it on a map. It is the long inland valley of the river Magra, tucked into the top corner of Tuscany, where the region presses up against Liguria on one side and Emilia on the other, with the spine of the Apennines closing it off to the north and the Apuane closing it off to the south. The name comes from Luni, a Roman colony on the coast that was once important and is now in ruins, which we visited years later. The Malaspina ran most of it for five centuries from a string of castles set on every defensible spur, and you can still see them, half a dozen ruined towers visible from any high road. The dialect bends toward Liguria. The food, for the same reason, leans that way too: chestnut flour, panigacci and testaroli cooked between hot terracotta discs, the same fried bread strips we had eaten at the La Posta restaurant in Equi Terme, lardo cured down in Colonnata over the ridge, pesto from the Ligurian side mixed with pecorino from the Tuscan side.

Lunigiana is one of the older parts of Italy and one of the least visited, and that those two facts are connected. It was a transit corridor for two thousand years, the way the Via Francigena pilgrims walked from Canterbury to Rome, and it was poor for almost as long, and the modern motorway and the modern railway both threaded through it on their way to somewhere else and left the valley itself alone. The chestnut woods that run down from Marciaso are the same chestnut woods that fed the people of these mountains for a thousand years, when they were too far up for wheat, and the chestnut was, locally, the bread tree. The marble quarries you can see from any high point are the same quarries Michelangelo came to choose his stone from, and the men who work them now drive home up the same valleys their grandfathers walked. Nothing about this region was ever picturesque in the way the brochures sell. It was working country, mountain country, and it has stayed that way because nobody arrived to convert it into something else.

Which brings me to what I want to say about Marciaso, and what I did not understand until we had been there a few weeks. The village has nothing to sell you. There is no shop that pretends to be artisanal. No one has printed a postcard. There is no boutique with linen aprons in the window, no enoteca with a tasting flight at thirty euros, no laminated menu in three languages, no carved wooden sign in the lettering that means rustic. The walls are stone because the houses were built of stone. The doors are old because nobody replaced them. The piazza is small because a village that has barely hundred people do not need a large one. There is a church and a bar and a bus stop, and beyond that, the village is just itself, doing what it has done since the twelfth century, which is to be a place where some people live.

This is, I have come to understand, the actual Italy. It is also, by a strange accounting, the rare Italy. Most of the borghi people traveled to villages exactly like this one, until they were not. Somewhere along the line, a guidebook noticed them. Then a magazine. Then a film crew. Then the buses started coming up the hill. The bar that served the locals got a Negroni list. The trattoria where the men ate at noon received a Slow Food sticker and a wine pairing. The piazza filled with people taking photographs of each other. The shops that sold flour and shoelaces became shops that sold ceramic Pinocchios and Tuscan-themed olive oil in ten-euro bottles. The houses got bought, and the families left, and the place that the photographs were of is no longer the place the photographs are of.

Marciaso has none of that, because Marciaso has nothing for anyone to want. There is no view spot for the bus to disgorge a crowd onto. There is no famous painting in the church. The Malaspina, who were lords of this corner, spent their attention on Fosdinovo, ten kilometers west on its proper ridge, and they left Marciaso to itself, and self is what it has stayed. Not that if Fosdinovo was any more popular or crowded than Marciaso now…

Which means that walking the loop of the borgo at six in the evening, when the light goes that particular Apennine pink, you see what you came to Italy to see in the first place, before anyone explained it to you. An old woman with a basket of greens is going slowly up the steeper street. Two men outside the closed door of Da Lino, talking about something that happened in 1987 with the same intensity as if it had happened that morning. A cat. A smell of woodsmoke and onions and something braising. The mountains, which were here first and will be here last, holding the village in their hand.

And the hospitality, the actual hospitality, not the version of it printed on hotel brochures. Sophia and I are foreigners. We were obviously foreign, walking the same loop at the same hours every day with our dog. Yet, the barwoman at Da Lino, on the one Saturday we ate there, brought us a small glass of something at the end of the meal that was not on the menu and would not be on the bill, and she did not make a thing of it. We were strangers, and we were treated as guests of the place, with the particular Italian grace that does not ask you to perform gratitude in return. Nobody was selling us anything. There was nothing to sell.

When we ate out, the food was the food the village ate. Down in Monzone, in the Lucido valley where two streams meet, and the railway runs along the lower town, there is a place called Da Remo. We went there for the first time in our second week and went back almost weekly after. The room is bright. The tables are full of men eating quickly, families on a Sunday eating slowly, two old men in the corner who have eaten there for forty years and will eat there for as many more as they get. The menu is a single sheet of paper with that day’s dishes typed in black, no flourishes, no English. We ate wild boar stew, and a pasta with meat sauce (probably from the same boar stew) whose shape I no longer remember, and they brought us a basket of panzerotti, the small fried strips of bread dough they make in this valley, with a plate of soft cheese and salumi to wrap them around. The boar was dark and slow and tasted of the woods we had been walking in. The pasta did not pretend to be anything. The bread was hot. The wine came from a jug, not a bottle. The bill, when it came, embarrassed us.

I had eaten in Italy for years. I had eaten well, by every measure travel writing uses. I had not eaten anything as good as that, and the reason I had not eaten anything as good as that was that nobody at Da Remo had ever needed to convince anyone of anything. They were cooking what people from the valley eat, for the people from the valley, and the people from the valley were eating it. The cooking was honest because the audience was honest. Take the audience away, replace it with people who flew in from Atlanta to have an Italian Experience, and within five years the boar would have a foam on it, and the panzerotti would come three to a plate with a quenelle of something, and the bill would have a zero added to it. The wine would come in a fancy bottle. Same wine.

We started venturing further. Fosdinovo, the commune we technically belonged to, the castle on its ridge looking down toward the sea, five centuries of Malaspina. We walked the borgo and saw the same architecture as Marciaso, the same stone, the same loop of streets, only larger, with a piazza that worked and a bar that opened every day. After a while, we realized that almost every village in this area, probably in the entire country is the same village in different sizes. A spur of rock. A castle, ruined or kept. A church. A loop of houses. The food shifts a little from valley to valley, the dialect bends, the saint changes name. The bones are the same.

And here is what I want the reader to do, slowly, in their head. Picture Fosdinovo, with its castle and its piazza and its stone. Now picture Montepulciano. Now picture San Gimignano. Now picture Volterra. The castles are the same castles. The stone is the same stone. The pink hour is the same pink hour. The piazza is the same piazza. The bones, as I said, are the same. The single, only, total difference between Fosdinovo and San Gimignano is that someone wrote about San Gimignano in 1972 and nobody has yet bothered to write about Fosdinovo. That is it. That is the whole thing. The cheap painted plates in the windows of San Gimignano are not a feature of Tuscan villages. They are a feature of Tuscan villages that have been told they are Tuscan villages for long enough that they have started agreeing.

Drive an hour up from the coast in this country, into the actual mountains and not the hills, and you find the unwritten version. The same materials, the same medieval geometry, the same old men outside the same closed door, the same plate of pasta. Only without the layer of gloss that has been laid over the famous places like an Instagram filter. The economy is different. The climate is different. October on the coast is a long, warm afternoon. October at four hundred meters is a short, cold one with leaves coming down in handfuls and the woodsmoke starting at three. The people are different, slightly, in the way that people who have spent their lives in a valley with one road in are different from people who have spent their lives in a valley with a railway station and a thousand-year-old reason for outsiders to come look. Less practiced. Less suspicious, oddly, because they are not constantly being asked things by strangers. More likely to take a few minutes with you because they have a few minutes.

Then there were the terme. Half the place names along this flank of the Apuane have the word in them, and we worked out, slowly, that the whole mountain is laced with hot water coming up out of the rock. We drove down to Equi Terme one evening, late, and that was the night the trip turned. Equi sits at the bottom of a gorge cut by the Catenelle torrent, the Pizzo d’Uccello looming above it, a thermal spring, and a borgo so small and so dark and so full of stone it felt like walking into a fold of the mountain. We had dinner at La Posta. The room was full. The faces around us were not the faces of weekenders from Florence or Milan. They were local faces, the kind that grow up in a valley and stay there. They were eating panzerotti in stacks, with stracchino and prosciutto, and a chestnut cream for the sweet ones at the end. We ordered the same.

I sat at that table, looked around the room, and thought: this is what San Gimignano was, before. This is what Montepulciano was, before. This is what every Tuscan village ever photographed for a wall calendar was, before someone took the photograph. A room full of people who live there, eating food made by their neighbors, on a weeknight in late October, with the rain starting outside and a fire in the corner and no one performing anything for anyone. And the only reason this room still exists, in this particular form, is that the road into Equi Terme is bad, and the signage is poor, and there is no famous painting to draw a tour bus, and the chestnut woods around it have not yet been written about.

The roads back up at night are the part of mountain life no one writes about. The chestnut leaves are wet. The verges are loose. There are no streetlights once you leave the bigger borghi, and the high beams make tunnels through the dark, and a fox crosses, and the GPS gives up, and you drive by what you remember of the route from earlier, slower than you would think possible. We made that drive many times. We made it back from Fosdinovo, from Monzone, from Equi, from a dozen smaller places we tried once and did not return to, and each time the last hairpin into Marciaso was the moment of arriving home, which was not a thing I had expected to feel about a stone house with semi-functional heat in a village I had picked off a map.

Under an hour from the door of our house, if you point the car west and let it fall, you are in Carrara, then on the coast, then in Versilia, where the umbrellas line up in their colored rows and the cars from Milan park three deep along the Forte. Versilia is twenty minutes of vertical descent away from Marciaso and a different country.

Two months in, when we left, we drove out the way we had come in. There are villages all over this country exactly like Marciaso. Most of them you have never heard of. None of them is on anyone’s list. They have nice people, and food made out of what grows around them, and a church and a piazza and an alimentari and a cafe, and around them some of the most beautiful and various land in Europe. They do not have shops selling ceramic Pinocchios. They do not have menus in three languages. They do not have anyone explaining themselves.

That is the whole thing. That is the entire offer. An hour up from the coast, the country becomes itself again. You only have to commit to the road in.

There is this Italian saying, il buon giorno si vede dal mattino, which roughly says, ‘you can tell a good day from the morning.’ I picked this not just because it is a bit fatalistic, but also because it signals a start. I started Anywhere Italy a week ago. Our community already needs a 3-table reservation at a trattoria, which makes me even more optimistic about something that started as a love project.

The best thing about being an expat in any country is the ability to see things with fresh eyes. I don’t see the deepest depths, the transgenerational problems, or the nuanced details, since I don’t work with other Italians, haven’t married an Italian, don’t have an Italian family, or even a circle of local friends here. But for sure, as a straniero, I see things without any social pressures. Fresh. Not correct, just honest. I want to share this honest view with you every week, and through the posts we create on our page.

Allora, since this is a weekly newsletter, I’ll share where we went & did this week. I immediately want to break this not-even-existing habit by telling you where we went last week instead, because this week, well, we were busy launching Anywhere Italy. So, last week we went to Umbria.

Umbria is a better version of Tuscany in that it is free of tourists. Compared to Toscana, there is literally nothing extraordinary to see there. There are Assisi, Gubbio, Todi, and some other smaller hilltop towns. Nearly identical to Volterra or Montepulciano, but compared to those, almost no one goes to the Umbria ones. Umbria is also one of the few Italian regions without access to the sea. It has steep hills, deep forests, and almost no international airport connections or bigger cities. Yes, there’s Perugia. But that’s pretty much that.

So, naturally, we love Umbria so much. We were able to score a week's stay in San Savino, a small borgo (a medieval castle-like mountain-top village) overlooking Lake Trasimeno, one of the largest lakes in Italy, just a few minutes’ drive from Perugia.

We visited Assisi, which has one of the most dramatic basilicas we’ve seen in such an old town like this, and it is famous because, of course, St. Francis of Assisi. The town is amazing if you skip the main road from the basilica to the main square and you take the small alleys, otherwise, you end up in a weird Catholic Disneyland. I’m almost certain that not just Jesus, but St. Francis would have set fire to the gimmick shops selling trinkets to everyone passing by, and I am a bit surprised that no one tried to sell a St. Francis-styled coffee mug.

There will be new posts shared from this trip, as we have so much to tell about Perugia, Todi, Assisi, and the Trasimeno Lake area, especially the fact that I could taste freshwater fish that wasn’t trout. By the sea, we are pampered with endless options of seafood, so having freshwater fish is something that we treat almost like a delicacy. If you are around that area, don’t be afraid to try some.

As you can tell from the pictures, the weather was kinda April-like. We did have rainfall on us in Perugia multiple times, which made climbing up and down to the old town, which is obviously on the top of a mountain-hill-something, so we had to climb a lot, and I mean a lot, despite the beloved minimetro that is famous in Perugia.

The weather has improved a lot this week, so, on top of launching Anywhere Italy, we visited the flower festival, which is an annual event on the first weekend of May here in Marina di Pietrasanta. This time, it was combined with Labor Day and Mother’s Day, so extra-super-special, it truly feels as if all of Firenze is trying to fit onto our small piazza.

We’ll share more about that experience next week.

Alla prossima,

Peter

Pietrasanta, 3 May 2026

Our new guide

We publish a new guide every other week, sometimes weekly. They are collections of articles around one area, region, or topic. Our first guide was obvious to produce for us, since we actually live here: Versilia. The beautiful coast of Tuscany, which most tourists totally overlook.

If I say the word Toscana, you probably picture cedar trees, hilltop towns, the Chianti region, the Vall d'Orca, the Renaissance of Firenze, and so on. Almost no one pictures this 20km of uninterrupted sandy coast, with the dramatic backdrop of the Apuan Alps on one side and the Tyrrhenian Sea on the other.

Our guides are published weekly, and we constantly update them with new articles. So worth checking back on them from time to time.

Read our Versilia guide here:

This is something I want to say about side dishes in Italy before I go further. The list is short. Four things, five at most, and the same four or five everywhere from Pietrasanta to Perugia: roast potatoes, beans, fried vegetables in season, and a pile of boiled greens called variously erbe, erbette, verdure lesse, depending on who is writing the menu and whether they feel like committing. That is it. This was a culture shock for me when I arrived.

I come from a tradition where the meat sits on a mountain of fried potatoes, and the vegetables, if they appear at all, are decorative. Hungarians, Brits, Germans, and Americans all share this in some form. We love our food piled together on one plate, the carbs doing serious structural work, the meat enthroned on top. A schnitzel on a hill of crispy potatoes is a perfectly reasonable Tuesday across Vienna to Budapest.

The Italian secondo arrives almost naked. A piece of fish, a slab of meat, sometimes a slice of lemon, sometimes nothing. The carbs were already eaten, in the primo, as pasta. The meal has a different architecture, and the meat is not asked to share its plate with anyone. The contorno, when ordered, comes on its own little dish, a small republic.

Back to Todi. I reached for the greens with mild suspicion. They were warm but not hot, dressed with olive oil and salt, perhaps a squeeze of lemon, nothing else. I took a bite of the ragù, dark with pepper and reduced wine, almost the consistency of beef bourguignon but somehow more direct, no carrots or pearl onions softening the argument, just meat and time. Then a forkful of the greens. Then both together.

It was an immediate conversion. The bitterness of the leaves cut the fat of the boar in a way I had not understood was a thing one might want a vegetable to do. The oil on the greens was the same oil I would have poured on the meat. The lemon, if it was there, lifted everything by half a degree. I ate the entire plate exactly as it was given to me, including the greens I had been about to leave for the kitchen. I did not order potatoes. I have, to be honest, mostly stopped ordering potatoes in Italy unless pork is involved, and that is a separate British (and Hungarian) loyalty I cannot quite extinguish. Ribs need their freakin’ chips. I will die on that hill.

For everything else, the greens.

The dish I had in Todi is not, I have since learned, exclusively Tuscan or Umbrian, and it is not particularly complicated. Boil the greens, drain them, dress them, eat them. A child could do it. What changes from region to region is what goes into the bowl. In the Veneto, they boil bruscandoli, the wild hop shoots that come up in spring, alongside carletti, pissacani, and young poppy plants called rosole, sometimes finished with butter or lard rather than oil. In Salento, they make foje rasse, a mix of wild chicory, dandelion, borage, and asparagus shoots, sometimes cooked together with pork rind, which is its own particular argument about flavor. In the alpine north, in Alto Adige, the same logic produces something different again; the greens are often folded into knödel or ravioli rather than served plain. There is a study from a few years ago that counted 219 wild species used as cooked leafy greens in Tuscany alone. Two hundred and nineteen.

The dish, in other words, is not the dish. The dish is whatever was growing within walking distance, boiled and dressed simply. Italians, being Italians, do this by the kilometer rather than by the country. A Versilia mix is not a Salento mix, and a Friulano mix is not a Versilia mix, and to suggest otherwise to anyone here would earn you a long, slow look. The combination is local because the combination is always local. This is true of almost everything Italian. The pasta shape, the salume, the dialect, the bread. People who think Italian cuisine is one cuisine have not been paying attention.

What is particularly Tuscan, I think, is the restraint of the dressing. Other regions add lard, butter (not like Gordon Ramsay's level ‘a knob of butter!’), pork rind, and sometimes garlic fried in oil. The Tuscan version is olive oil and salt, and a finish of lemon, if anyone remembers. That is a choice. It is the same choice the Tuscans make about almost everything. Strip it back. Let the ingredient sit there in its own truth. A Frenchie would build a sauce. A Brit would make a gravy. An American would do a dip. A Tuscan will not insult the meat or the greens with any of these.

We have a woman near here, in Querceta, just outside Pietrasanta, who makes erbe in jars. There is no shop. You go to the place, she sells the jars, you know the lady and the address, or you do not. This is how a great deal of food works in this part of the country, beneath the surface of the supermarket where I can also, perfectly well, buy decent erbe at the Esselunga whenever I want. Both things are true, and they coexist. When I cook a steak at home, which I do more than Sophie probably wants to admit, I prefer the lady’s jars. The greens taste of someone’s specific morning rather than of an industrial average.

There is one more thing about erbe, and I will admit, it borders on the medicinal. My stomach is not what a Hungarian stomach is supposed to be. I rely on amaro at the end of a heavy meal, the way some men rely on their phones. What I have noticed, and others have noticed long before me and built whole regional cuisines around the noticing, is that bitter cooked greens make a fiorentina sit lighter. Whether this is pharmacology or psychology, I do not know and do not particularly care. Old people here will tell you the bitter ones, the cicoria, the tarassaco, the borage, are good for the liver. Maybe they are. What is certain is that you can eat a kilo and a half of beef cooked rare over olive wood, drink most of a bottle of red, and walk home afterward feeling, against all reason, like a person who has made responsible choices. The greens convert the meal. They do not detract from it. You eat the steak, you eat the greens, and you walk out of the trattoria into the evening feeling like a member of Greenpeace.

A monstrous meal becomes, somehow, a virtuous one. Italians have known this for a very long time. I learned it on a Tuesday in Todi, by accident, with a bowl of black-red boar on one side of the plate and a heap of dark wet leaves on the other, and I have not eaten my meat the same way since.

A reading. Recorded along the bike path between Marina di Pietrasanta and Forte dei Marmi, May 2026.

The written piece: Marina di Pietrasanta — A Weekend in May

So that’s what this guide is. The reasons. And my recommendations.

Versilia is a 20-kilometer stretch of the Tuscan coast in the province of Lucca, between Lake Massaciuccoli in the south and the Ligurian border in the north. The towns most people have heard of are Forte dei Marmi (because of the rich), Viareggio (because of the carnival), and Pietrasanta (because of the marble and the artists). Most people who travel to Tuscany have never heard of any of it. Tuscany, in the foreign imagination, is Florence, Chianti, Val d’Orcia, and the hills. The coast doesn’t exist. Even the official Italian tourism establishment doesn’t really push it, when ENIT publishes its big “Viaggio Italiano” guides for international travelers, Versilia is not in them. Tuscany skips its own coast.

That’s the first reason it’s the best part of Italy. You are not stepping on tourists here. I lived in Rome and Florence during COVID, when the cities emptied out, and locals could finally walk through their own piazzas, and it was the most beautiful version of those cities I have ever seen. Now, when I go back, getting to a restaurant or a museum requires hidden passages and timing tricks. In Versilia, except for July and August, you don’t have that feeling. You can live here. You can also visit here, and the place treats you like a person, not a line item on the tourism board’s sheet.

The second reason is proximity. From Pietrasanta, by car or by train, Pisa and Lucca are under an hour. The Cinque Terre is under an hour. Florence is under two. Bologna is under three. Venice and Rome are about four. The port of Livorno is forty-five minutes, which means island-hopping in the Tuscan archipelago is a day trip. For us, anything between Trieste in the north and Rome in the south is reachable for lunch and back by dinner. Versilia is not a destination you fly into and stay put. It’s a base. Italy radiates out from it.

The third reason is what’s inside Versilia itself. The beach here is one of the longest uninterrupted stretches of sandy coast in Italy. Within 5 minutes of my front door, I can be on that beach, or in 30 minutes, up in the Apuan Alps with marble quarries above me, or in the Tuscan hill country with cypress-lined roads and stone villages. In winter, the ski slopes at Abetone open, and you can technically ski in the morning and swim — well, walk on the sand — in the afternoon. I don’t know how many places on the planet let you do that. I’ve found a few. None of them is in Tuscany.

The fourth reason is that it works. Versilia is in northern Italy, except on the official map (Tuscany is considered the ‘middle of Italy’). The trains run, the services function, the roads are maintained, and most things you need are open when they say they are. If you’ve gotten used to Northern European or American levels of reliability and want to keep them while moving to Italy, Versilia is the part of Italy where you can. The trade-off is price — this is not the cheap south. Forte dei Marmi has Northern European resort pricing. Pietrasanta and Camaiore are reasonable. Viareggio is honest. I’ve lived in Calabria and Sicily. Wonderful people and amazing places, but I would probably wouldn’t pick them as my home, to be honest. I value my double-glazing windows, full insulation, prompt trash collection, and working services around me, sorry.

And the last reason is the most personal one. I rarely sleep anywhere else in Italy, because I don’t need to. Versilia and its surroundings can deliver almost anything Italy has to offer. The best Fiorentina I know is at a butteri ranch thirty minutes from my house. The best wines in Europe are an hour and a half south in Bolgheri or east in Chianti. The best seafood I’ve eaten in Italy comes off the boats at Viareggio. If I want a rougher beach, I go south. If I want stones and blue water, I go thirty minutes north into Liguria. If I want quiet, I go up into the marble villages above Carrara. Everything is here, or it’s an hour away.

That’s why I live here. That’s why this is the guide I wanted to write first. Below is everything I’d tell a friend planning a trip — where to base, what not to miss, what to eat, and how not to get it wrong.

Why Versilia

The TLDR version.

• You’re not stepping on tourists. Outside of July and August, Versilia is livable. Local life is intact. You don’t need tricks to get into a restaurant.

• Everything in Italy is within reach. Pisa, Lucca, Cinque Terre — under an hour. Florence — under two. Bologna — under three. Rome and Venice — about four. The Tuscan archipelago is a day trip.

• Beach, mountains, and Tuscan hills in 30 minutes. Italy’s longest uninterrupted sandy beach. The Apuan Alps with their marble quarries. Stone villages with cypress roads. All within half an hour of each other.

• It actually works. Trains run, services function, and things are open when they say they are. Northern Italy's infrastructure, Tuscan food, and weather.

• It’s still Tuscany. The food, the hill towns, the wine, the light. You’re not trading the Tuscan experience for the coast — you’re getting both.

The trade-off: this isn’t the cheap south. Forte dei Marmi prices like a Northern European resort. The rest of Versilia sits at upper-middle European pricing. You’re paying for proximity, infrastructure, and the absence of crowds.

Where to base yourself

Marina di Pietrasanta

This is where I’d put you. Marina is the calm middle of Versilia — quieter than Forte dei Marmi, more polished than Viareggio, and within a fifteen-minute drive of every other town in this guide. The bagni are serious, the pine forest behind the beach is one of the best on the Italian coast, and you can be in Pietrasanta proper, the artistic capital, in ten minutes. If you’re staying for a weekend or a week, base here and radiate out from here.

The places not to miss

Pietrasanta

If you only have one day in Versilia, spend it in Pietrasanta. This is the artistic capital, where Michelangelo first sourced his marble in the 1500s and where Botero and Mitoraj chose to settle and work. The piazza is one of the most beautiful in Tuscany, and the workshops still produce sculpture for clients across the world. It’s also where I live.

Viareggio

The largest town in Versilia and the one with the most working life still in it. The Carnival in February is one of the biggest in Italy, the Liberty-style architecture along the seafront is the real thing, and the fish market is where the best seafood in Versilia comes from. Don’t write it off as the cheap option — it’s where the actual coast is.

Carrara, Colonnata, and the Marble Mines

Half an hour north of Pietrasanta, the Apuan Alps rise white from quarries that have been worked since the Romans. Colonnata, the village halfway up, is where lardo is cured in marble basins and where you should eat it for lunch. The mines themselves are stunning and unsettling in equal measure — go.

Worth a visit

Forte dei Marmi

The expensive end of Versilia and the most internationally famous town. Worth a half-day for the Wednesday market, the seafront promenade, and the bagni that have been running since the 1920s. If you want to know what Italian old-money summer looks like, this is it. Don’t try to eat dinner here unless you’ve planned for it.

→ Read our feature on Forte dei Marmi

Camaiore

Inland and uphill, Camaiore is the quiet Versilia. The medieval center is intact, the Sunday market is real, and the food is better than on the coast for half the price. It’s where I’d retire if I weren’t already living here.

→ Read our feature on Camaiore

Torre del Lago

The southern edge of Versilia, on the lake where Puccini lived and worked. The Puccini Festival every summer is one of the great open-air opera experiences in Italy. Outside festival season, it’s quiet, almost ghostly, and that’s part of the charm.

→ Read our feature on Torre del Lago

Casoli

Casoli is the hill town behind Camaiore — technically inland Versilia, geographically the start of the Apuan foothills. Worth the half-hour drive for one of the best long-table village dinners in the region.

→ Read our feature on Casoli

The food only here

Tordelli lucchesi. The regional pasta — meat-filled and served with ragù — descended from medieval Lucca. If you eat one pasta in Versilia, eat this one.

→ More about the tordello

Lardo di Colonnata. Cured pork fat aged in marble basins, served on warm bread with a glass of red. It sounds like nothing. It is everything.

→ More about the lardo

Where to eat

→ Trattoria da Carlino, Marina di Pietrasanta. Family-run, fish-only, no pretense, and the best plate of cacciucco I’ve eaten on this coast.

→ Trattoria Gatto Nero, Pietrasanta. Nonna’s cooking inside the old gates. Barely a few tables that feel like eating at home.

More restaurants are coming as the archive grows. This section will be updated regularly.

My final note

This guide is alive. I update it whenever a new piece on Versilia goes up — a new restaurant, a new town, a new dispatch from a festival. Bookmark it.

Everything in here is a place I’ve 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.

I bring only good for you. This is the part of Italy I chose to live in, and I’m not sending readers somewhere I wouldn’t send a friend. The frankness in these pieces is the same frankness I’d use across a dinner table.

Guide last updated: 3 May 2026.

What follows is less a set of rules than a way of seeing. The fundamentals are simple. The traps are the parts nobody tells you about until you’ve already stepped into one.

The colors on the asphalt. Italian street parking uses a three-color system, and the colors do all the work. White lines mean free parking. Blue lines mean paid parking. Yellow lines mean reserved — for residents, the disabled, delivery vehicles, or taxis, depending on the sign above. The system is consistent across the country (kinda), which is itself a small miracle. The complication is that the lines fade, and a faded blue line on a hot piazza in July looks identical to a faded white line on the same piazza, and the parking officer who arrives at three in the afternoon is not interested in your visual interpretation of the asphalt. The rule is simple: if you cannot tell whether the line is blue or white, the line is blue. Pay. The cost is two euros. The fine is much higher.

The parking meter and the apps. The blue zones still have those small gray meters from the 1990s on the corners, still take coins, and still print a paper receipt you put on the dashboard. They also work. But almost every Italian under fifty now uses an app — EasyPark is the one with the pink logo, the one most cities accept. Telepass handles parking and highway tolls together, which is convenient if you are driving any distance. You download it before you need it, enter the plate number once, select the zone code from the sign, and pay by phone. The receipt lives in the app. If a parking officer wants to check, he reads the plate, and the system tells him whether you have paid. There is no paper involved. Miracles everywhere.

The hours that matter. Read the sign above the blue zone before you put any money in it. Most blue zones are open only between eight in the morning and eight in the evening, free at night, free on Sundays, free on holidays. Some have a maximum stay of two or three hours, even if you are willing to pay for more. The sign tells you all of this in Italian, in small letters, and the wrench symbol next to a time range means payment is required; outside these hours, it is free. The mistake people make is to assume the rules are the same in every town. They are not. A blue zone in Pietrasanta runs different hours from a blue zone in Lucca, an hour up the road. Look at the sign. The information you need is on it.

The market. This one trips more locals than tourists, and it is worth knowing because the consequences are severe. Almost every Italian town has a market day, usually on Saturday, sometimes on Wednesday, sometimes both, and on market day, the streets where the market sets up are closed to parking from very early in the morning until the stalls have been packed away in the afternoon. The signs are clear. They are also small, often posted only at the street entrance, and if you parked there at ten o’clock the night before, you may not have noticed the sign in the dark. The next morning, at six, the police arrive. By seven, your car is on a flatbed truck on its way to a fenced lot on the edge of town, and you will spend the morning paying somewhere between a hundred and three hundred euros to get it back. The rule: if you are parking in a town center on a Friday evening, walk fifty meters in each direction first and read the signs. If any of them mention a mercato or a fiera, move the car.

The ZTL. This is the one to take seriously. Zona a Traffico Limitato — limited traffic zone — means the historic center of almost every Italian town of any age, and in a ZTL you cannot drive, full stop, unless your plate has been pre-registered. The boundaries are marked by a round red sign, sometimes accompanied by a small camera mounted on a pole. The camera reads your plate. There is no police officer involved. There is no judgment. If you drive through, even by accident, even because your GPS told you to, even because you were lost looking for your hotel, you have been fined, and the fine arrives by mail at the address registered with your rental car company three months later, and it is roughly a hundred euros each time, and if you drove into the ZTL twice on the same day looking for somewhere to park, that is two fines. Hotels within ZTL zones can register your plate for the duration of your stay, which exempts you from the restrictions. Every other reason to be inside a ZTL with a car is a reason not to be there. The general rule when navigating any historic center is to park outside the walls and walk. The towns were designed for this.

The garages. In bigger cities and tourist-heavy towns, there are designated parking lots, parcheggi, with gates and ticket machines, and they work the same way as everywhere else in Europe — you take a ticket on entry, pay at a kiosk before returning to the car, and the gate lifts. Underground garages are the most secure option. Some of them are also small and tight, and the attendant will ask for your keys so he can park the car for you. This is normal. He will leave the keys in the ignition and move three other cars to fit yours into a corner. Hand over the keys. Don’t leave anything visible inside. This is the system, and it works.

The space around your car. When you park on the street, leave space. More space than you would leave anywhere else. Italians are not particular about small scratches on their cars, and many of the cars on the road belong to drivers in their seventies whose vehicles lack parking sensors, and they will get out of the spot you have boxed them into one way or another. If your bumper takes a small hit in the process, that is, in the local moral economy, a problem you created by parking too close. Leave a meter on each end. Or pay for full insurance on the rental and stop worrying about it.

The break-in. Burglaries on parked cars are not a widespread problem in Italy, but they are not unheard of, and the variable that matters more than location is whether your car looks like a tourist’s car. A foreign license plate is a tell. Tinted windows that hide the back seat are a tell. Suitcases visible through the rear window are a confession. I had the rear side window of my car smashed once, in the center of Turin, in a paid parking spot on a well-lit street, with nothing visible inside — but the windows were tinted, and the plate was foreign, and someone wanted to know what was behind the tint badly enough to spend forty seconds with a hammer to find out. Nothing was taken. The window cost three hundred euros to replace. The Italian police, to their enormous credit, were on the scene within ten minutes and could not have been kinder. The lesson: hide everything, every time, even on the back seat, even the empty backpack you were going to throw out anyway. A thief does not know it is empty until he has already broken the window.

The fine. If you do get a parking ticket, you will find a small paper notice tucked under the windshield wiper. Do not ignore it. Walk into any tabaccheria — the shops with the blue sign and the white T — and hand the notice to the woman behind the counter. She will scan the QR code, take your money, and hand you a receipt. The whole transaction takes ninety seconds. The fines escalate if unpaid, and trying to pay one from another country six months later is the kind of bureaucratic exercise that will turn your hair white. Pay it the same day. Move on.

The simplest way to get nearly all of this right, when you are standing on a strange street in a strange town with a strange line painted on the asphalt and you cannot tell what any of it means, is to walk into the nearest bar and ask. Parcheggio libero qui? — Is parking free here? The man behind the espresso machine will look up, look out the door at your car, look back at you, and answer in three words. Sì, libero. Yes, free. Or No, blu, devi pagare. No, blue, you have to pay. Or, more usefully, he will gesture across the street and say meglio là — better over there — and then you walk over there, and you park, and the day continues. Italians are extraordinarily helpful about this. They have all parked badly at some point in their lives, and they remember how it felt. Use them.

The deeper point is this. Parking, in Italy, is one of the small daily places where the country teaches you how it actually works — that the signs mean what they say, that the rules are local rather than national, that the consequences arrive automatically and the appeals process is designed to discourage you, but also that a stranger in a bar will help you figure out the entire thing in under a minute if you ask politely. Read the asphalt. Read the signs. Hide the bag. Pay the fine on the day. Walk into the bar. The car will be there in the morning, and the day will not be about the car.

Last note: these tips come from a dude who was brave (or outright stupid enough) to buy a new Civic from the dealer (in Hungary, with a Hungarian license plate), then, a week later, immediately drove down from Budapest to Palermo. Some people say Palermo is the single greatest driving challenge in Europe, probably in the world. I parked on a street without a camera, and haven’t checked the colors, and left the car there for 2 weeks. Maybe it’s faith, god, or whatever it was, maybe the fact that we parked in front of a church, but no break-ins, no one stole my car, no fine arrived, and no scratches either. Since then (years passed), obviously, I have improved my parking game, got my local plate, and I’m also registered at the local municipality so I can park wherever the f I want now. You can’t be more local than this.

The slices were almost translucent. White, faintly pink, the rind dark, the surface still grainy with salt and pepper and rosemary from however long they had spent in the conca, the marble tub, before being shaved off the block. They had no smell in the paper. Ten seconds on warm bread, and they had a strong smell. The pepper showed up first. Then the garlic, late and quiet. Then the fat itself, which is not fat the way American bacon is fat, or Hungarian szalonna is fat, or English back bacon is fat. It is closer to butter than to bacon, except that butter does not taste of pork, and this did. Faintly. At depth. The way a cellar tastes of wine, even when the wine is not in the room.

A few things you should know.

There is no smoke involved. None. Anywhere. This matters if, like me, you grew up in a country where preserving pork is built on smoke. In Hungary, the belly of the pig goes into salt and then into a smokehouse for days, sometimes finished with paprika and garlic, and the result is dense, ferocious, mineral. Szalonna takes over a stew the way a strong personality takes over a dinner. I love it. My stomach can take only a little at a time. A slice of bread with paprika paste is called katonák, soldiers.

Lardo is the opposite logic. Salt and time, no smoke. Slow Mediterranean curing, the same logic as guanciale and pancetta, finished in marble instead of in a cellar. The cavatori, the marble quarrymen of the Apuan Alps, perfected it. They cut tubs from the fine-grained marble of the Canaloni basin (the only Apuan marble that worked), rubbed the inside with garlic, layered the fat with sea salt, black pepper, fresh garlic, fresh rosemary, and up to twenty other spices depending on the family recipe. They closed the tub with marble and left it in an unaired room for at least six months, often a year, sometimes two. The salt drew water out of the fat by osmosis, creating a brine called salamora, and the fat sat in the brine and slowly became something else.

In the 1990s, the EU sanitary authorities tried to ban it. Marble is porous; porous can’t be sterilized to industrial-food standards; therefore, the lardo had to come out of the marble and go into aluminum. The producers fought back. So did, of all people. The Slow Food movement, which now has chapters on five continents, more or less began with a pile of pork fat in a marble box on a hillside above Carrara. The IGP came in 2004. The cavatori had been right.

Colonnata, when I drove up the next weekend, was less of a tourist scene than I’d feared. The road ends at the village. The village is small and steep and faces the cave directly. Stand in the central square with a crostino (Tuscan bread, one shaving of lardo half-melted on top), and you eat across at the white wound in the mountain where the marble that made your conca was cut. If you go: one crostino, one coffee, the view. That’s the visit. You don’t need to drive up to eat the lardo. Marco’s slices were as good as anything I tasted in Colonnata. Same product, different view.

You can buy lardo 3 ways. Each one tells you what to do with it.

Sliced, razor-thin. This is how Marco sold it to me and how most non-Italians meet it. Eat it on bread. Alone. In a Tuscan trattoria, it shows up as antipasto, sometimes by itself, sometimes on grilled bread with a single drop of warm honey, sometimes (in the more rigorous places) with nothing at all. Three or four slices of bread are also the canonical opening before a bistecca alla fiorentina, on the theory that you can’t prepare for a serious piece of beef with anything other than its own family of substances.

In a chunk, by the kilo. This is the cavatore’s form, and the form a Hungarian recognizes immediately, because it’s how we sell szalonna: a brick, dense and white, cut at home over a wooden board with a sharp knife and a glass of something within reach. The chunk-buying habit is the working person’s habit. The fat lasts in a cool larder for months and feeds you when you need feeding.

Rendered into a spread. The grandmother’s form, the cook’s form. A spoonful melted into a ragù in the last twenty minutes does what no quantity of olive oil can do. Gives the sauce a body and a faintly cured depth that nothing else replaces. The least flashy and the most useful.

What you don’t do, what nobody who has thought about this for five minutes does, is dress lardo up. Lardo is not bacon. Bacon is a flavoring agent. Lardo is a finished thing. You don’t lay it over chicken to make the chicken better. You don’t pair it with strong cheeses. You don’t (and I’ve seen this at restaurants that should know better) wrap it around a scallop and grill it. The moment lardo meets direct heat for any length of time, it becomes a translucent puddle of grease, and you’ve destroyed in thirty seconds something that took a year to make. Warm a slice gently on hot bread. That’s the limit.

I’ll eat Hungarian szalonna the rest of my life. A good piece of British back bacon, when I find one in Italy, has its place at my table on a Sunday. I also love my fair share of American bacon with eggs. None of them can be eaten alone. American bacon raw is not a food. Szalonna on bread is a meal because the smoke and the paprika do the lifting. British bacon needs a pan and the Full English (unrelated, but may God bless the United Kingdom for the Full English, the best, and I mean the absolutely best breakfast in the entire planet, thank you, Brits, thank you).

Lardo di Colonnata is the only one that needs nothing. Not a pan, not a spice, not another ingredient. A piece of unsalted Tuscan bread is the most you should ask of it, and even that is a courtesy. The fat is the dish. The cavatori knew this. They took it into the cave at six in the morning, on a piece of bread, and they came home alive, which is a thing you can’t say of every cavatore on every shift, and the fat had done its part.

There is no recipe at the end of this. You buy the fat. You eat it.

You have to remember, eating in this country, that Italy is younger than the food. The unified Italian state is a hundred and sixty years old, the Republic is younger than most grandmothers, the standard Italian language is essentially a manufactured product of twentieth-century radio and television built on top of fourteenth-century Latin, and almost everyone older than seventy here still speaks the dialect of their commune at home with their family. Italians do not, in their bones, identify as Italian. They identify with their immediate family, the place where they were born, and the food they eat together at the Sunday table. There is no Tuscan identity except as a posture against a Venetian one, and there is no Versiliese identity to speak of either, because the people of Pietrasanta and the people of Viareggio, who live ten kilometers apart along the same coast, do not particularly mix and do not particularly want to. The unsalted Tuscan bread, the pane sciocco you find on every table here, exists as unsalted because of a salt war between Pisa and Firenze in the twelfth century, and the bakers of Tuscany have stayed angry about it for nine hundred years. I once met a grandmother near Verona who had grown up in Florence and moved north sixty years ago and still asks her daughter to bring her pane sciocco every time she visits, hard as a rock and unsalted, and the daughter does, because the bread is part of the grandmother and they both know it.

This is the country in which a tordello argument is a real argument.

The first time I tried to be clever about it, I sat down in a small place near Lucca and asked the waitress if I could have the tordelli versiliesi. She looked at me without smiling. She said, signore, this is not the tordello versiliese, here we only do the lucchese, if it suits you I’ll bring you some. It suited me. The plate that arrived was, as far as my mouth could tell, almost exactly the same as the tordelli I eat in Pietrasanta. Maybe a little more thyme. Maybe a slightly different ratio of pork to beef. I ate every one of them without asking for cheese, and I have never tried that line again. The point is not that the difference is large. The point is that the difference exists and that it must be respected, because if the difference is not respected, then we are us stops meaning anything, and we are us is the only thing this country has ever really agreed about.

The recipe varies by valley. In Versilia, they use bietole, mortadella, and pepolino. In Lucca, they argue over which is the original. In Massa Carrara, some kitchens drop the ragù in favor of a simpler tomato sauce. Up in Casoli, a hamlet on the hills above Camaiore, they put the meat into the pasta raw, the way the women of Casoli have always done it, and this method, called alla casolina, won this year’s Tordello d’Oro contest in March. In Viareggio, they soften the ripieno with ricotta. In Pedona, a few kilometers inland, they keep it austere: beef, eggs, parsley, almost nothing else. Each of these is the real tordello. All of them are. The pepolino has to be present and tasted in the ripieno, otherwise, as one Lucchese cook puts it, son banali tortelli, they’re just boring tortelli. The d in tordello is a small thing. The d matters.

The Tordello d’Oro contest, mentioned a moment ago, is in its fifth edition, run by a Versilian magazine out of Camaiore. According to them, tordello is essentially this: there is no codified recipe for the tordello, no disciplinare, and there may not even be such a thing as the best tordello, because every one of us has in mind the version we grew up with, and the contest exists not to crown a winner but to keep the dish in the public conversation. The winners are almost always not in the towns. They are in frazioni, hamlets, places like Casoli, Lombrici, Capezzano Pianore, and Levigliani, small mountain villages on the lower flanks of the Apuans where the road winds up past olive terraces and chestnut groves to a piazzetta with three buildings, one of which is a trattoria. These are the kitchens that have been making tordelli the same way for four generations, and the women in them are the contadine, the farmers’ wives, and on the next ridge over, the cavatori’s wives, the marble quarrymen we wrote about last week. Tordelli is what they cook on Sunday. It always has been. They ate it on Giovedì Grasso, the Thursday before Lent, when chicken was the cheaper meat for the ripieno and beef came later, when there was money for beef. Today, it’s made from 2/3 beef and 1/3 pork, mostly.

Don’t make tordelli at home. Filled pasta is for people who have done it for thirty years, who learned it standing next to their mother, who learned it standing next to her mother. Buy them. There is a pasticceria in Capezzano called Palmerini where I get mine, fresh from the back room on a small tray, and any Versilian town worth living in has its equivalent. Buy a small jar of meat ragù from the same place if you don’t make your own. At home: ragù in a wide pan over low heat, water boiling in a pot, three minutes for the tordelli, lift them straight out into the ragù with a slotted spoon, toss gently, plate, and grate parmigiano on top. It is the simplest thing you will cook this week. It will be one of the best things you eat.

What you are eating, when you eat a tordello in Versilia, is a small, specific argument that this place is not the next place over. The mountains behind you are not the mountains behind Lucca, even though they’re the same range. The bread on the table is not the bread of Bologna, an hour and a half north over the pass. The thyme in the ripieno grew on a stone wall that the cook walked past on her way home, on a hill that nobody in Pisa would recognize. The dish is the way the Versilian says I am here, I am from here, my mother and her mother were from here, and you are welcome to sit down at this table, but you are going to eat what we eat, and you are going to eat it the way we eat it. That is what a tordello is. The trophy on the shelf at Il Chiosco nel Bosco is papier-mâché. The dinner is real.

It is hard to miss. It sits inside the old walls of the centro storico on Piazza Carducci, right next to the post office, and if you park where I park when I come into town, you walk past its front door every time, the small black cat painted on the sign and the dehor with five or six tables under the portico. We walked past it for months before we went in. I cannot now remember why we waited. The room inside is small, maybe 10 covers total, with a caminetto against the back wall that is lit from October until April and stone walls that have been stone walls in this building since something like 1300. The tables have white cloths over a darker undercloth, the way Italian tables have had white cloths over a darker undercloth for as long as anyone has been eating off them indoors. The first time we came in, one of the waitresses, hearing my accent, told us in Hungarian that her mother was from Transylvania. She knows a few words. We have been going back ever since.

We almost always order the same thing.

The antipasto is a plate of crostini misti: thin slices of Tuscan unsalted bread, toasted and topped with five or six different toppings. There is one with pomodoro, fresh and acidic. There is the obligatory panzanella, the Tuscan summer salad of stale bread and tomato, served as a smear. There is something with eggplant, depending on the season. And there is the fegato, the liver pâté that is the canonical Tuscan crostino, dark and faintly metallic and finished with a splash of vin santo and a few capers, the small bitter punctuation that keeps the whole thing from going heavy. Fegato is the one you want. If you do not eat liver, you have not eaten Tuscany. The Gatto Nero’s fegato is not flashy. It is honest, the same way a piece of well-made hand soap is honest, and it tastes the way someone’s grandmother in Pisa was making it in 1962.

For the primo we sometimes share the soup, a Tuscan zuppa di verdure with cabbage and beans and bread cooked into the broth until everything has melted into everything else, which is its own subject for another piece. After that, Sophia and I diverge.

She orders the tagliata, a small Tuscan beef fillet sliced over arugula with grana shaved on top, simpler and lighter than the bistecca alla fiorentina that occupies the other end of this menu and that we have at home or save for special occasions. I order the trippa alla fiorentina, which is tripe stewed for hours in tomato and onion and finished with parmigiano, a dish that for most non-Italians requires either bravery or ignorance and that I would recommend on either basis to anyone within reach. Tripe is the stomach of a cow, cleaned and cooked until it gives up its toughness, and a kitchen that knows what it’s doing turns it into something silky and faintly sweet that has more in common with a slow-cooked osso buco than with anything you could call offal. The Gatto Nero’s trippa is the best version I have eaten in Versilia. I have ordered it almost every time I have been in this room. It has never disappointed me. Once, on a January night, Alberta came out from the kitchen, wiped her hands on her apron, and asked me how I was finding it, the way a serious cook asks when she already knows the answer.

We finish with the tiramisu. It is good. It is unfussy. It is a tiramisu.

Reading this back, I notice that none of what I have just described is in any way revolutionary, none of it would impress a food critic, and there is nothing on this menu that you have not already eaten in a dozen other Tuscan trattorie if you have been eating in Tuscany at all. This is the point. The Gatto Nero is not a destination restaurant. It is not on a list. It will not change your life with a single bite. What it will do is feed you well, the same way every time, in a room that does not perform, served by people who recognize you on the second visit and remember you on the fifth, while you have whatever conversation you came in to have.

There is a category of restaurant for which the food is the entire reason to go, and the room is incidental. There is another category for which the food is decent, and the room is the reason. The Gatto Nero is the third category and the rarest. The food is good. The room is good. Neither is the reason. The reason is that the place has been built over thirty years of doing the same thing well, without trying to be more than it is, the kind of low atmospheric pressure under which two people can actually hear each other.

I have told Sophia things at this table that I could not have told her anywhere else. Not because the food disarmed me. Not because the wine helped, though it did. Because the room had already decided that whatever we said to each other across the white tablecloth was none of its business, and because the fegato arrived without ceremony and the trippa arrived without ceremony, and Alberta did not come out unless we wanted her to, and because when you sit down in a place that knows you, you are free to have the conversation you came to have. This is what a trattoria is supposed to do, originally and in essence, and most of them have forgotten. The Gatto Nero, at thirty years and counting, has not.

If you come to Pietrasanta, eat there. Sit by the caminetto in winter. Sit in the dehor in summer. Order the fegato. Order the trippa, and if you cannot bring yourself to order the trippa, order the tagliata. Talk for three hours. Nobody will move you along. That, more than the food, is what you have come for.

I learned this the way you learn most useful things in Italy — slowly, by watching, and by being slightly embarrassed for the first month. We had moved here in the fall and assumed the umbrella rows were the beach. Forty euros for two sunbeds and a parasol seemed like a Tuscan tax we had to pay if we wanted to swim. Then one Saturday in early spring, I was walking from the pontile in Marina di Pietrasanta toward what I thought was the public stretch and a small Italian woman in her sixties cut diagonally through the gates of a Forte dei Marmi bagno with a folded blue towel under her arm and a thermos in her free hand, and she walked the length of two paid rows like a person crossing her own kitchen, and she set up at the waterline twenty meters past the last umbrella, and she sat down. Nobody looked twice. The bagnino poured wine for a couple at the bar.

This is what we recommend to others: a free beach with amenities. There are official spiagge libere — spiaggia libera, libero on the sign, sometimes a small painted dolphin to help — and those are the easiest to find, free passages between the paid clubs that the comune has reserved for the public. You spot them on Google Maps, you spot them walking the lungomare, you spot them by the absence of branded umbrellas and the presence of, usually, more sand than the paid stretches because the paid ones get raked at six in the morning by men in waders with metal combs, and the free ones do not. The free sand is the sand the sea actually leaves. It has shells in it. It has dune grass at the back. The grain is bigger.

Then there are the spiagge libere attrezzate, free beaches with basic equipment — a small bar, a toilet, a shower, a row of cheap plastic sunbeds you can rent for ten euros a day instead of forty. These are the ones I prefer. Usually, every marina area has at least one serviced, free beach. In Marina di Pietrasanta, where we live, it’s called Kevin Beach. It’s sitting next to the camper park, hammocks strung between concrete pillars, a bar that puts a rockabilly band on the deck once a month in summer. Le Dune in Forte dei Marmi is another, and the joke of Le Dune — a free beach in Forte dei Marmi, where the bagno across the fence rents a cabina for the season at the cost of a small car — is the whole reason I love it. Trabucco in Marina di Massa sits by the working harbor with the small fishing boats and the sailboats, and the sand there has not been groomed in a decade, and nobody is asking it to be. Lido di Camaiore has the spiaggia pubblica with families, folding chairs, and a guy selling cold cocomero off a cart. The free stretch by the port in Viareggio has the cargo ships in the middle distance, which I think is the most honest view of an Italian beach you can ask for.

Then there is the third option, the one the woman with the thermos was using, and that most travelers never figure out. You walk into any paid bagno on the coast. You smile at the bagnino if you feel like it. You walk past the umbrellas. You drop your towel on the wet sand past the last paid sunbed. You swim. You come back and sit. You read. The bagnino does not approach you. He cannot. The water belongs to nobody, and so does the sand inside two meters of it. If you need a bathroom, the bigger paid bagni leave them open all day, and the smaller ones lock theirs, but you can usually walk into the bar and order a coffee for two euros, and they hand you the key. If you need to rinse the salt off, every comune in Italy has installed free showers along the lungomare every two hundred meters, and they work. If you brought a sandwich, you eat the sandwich. If you brought a cooler, you crack the beer. Italians bring their pizza boxes from the nearby local pizzeria. Nobody is going to enforce anything. The Italian beach economy is built on the people who pay forty euros for the umbrella, not the people who don’t.

The thing I want to say about the free beach, though, is that it is not a budget option. It is not the discount alternative to the bagno. It is a better experience, and I would still go to it if the bagno were free, because the bagno is a haircut and the free beach is a beach. The umbrellas line up in pre-paid grids. The sunbeds face a single direction. A waiter brings you a spritz, and you tip him, and you tip the bagnino, and you have spent ninety euros by lunch, and you are sitting in a row with thirty other people who paid the same ninety euros, and the man under the next umbrella is taking a phone call. On the free beach, you put your towel where the sand stops sloping. You face whichever direction you want. The water is the same water. The light is the same light. You can hear the sea instead of someone else’s spritz.

The bagno sells you the idea of having booked a thing. The free beach sells you nothing. You have to bring your own water. You have to bring your own shade if you want shade. You have to leave your phone in the bag and get up to walk if you want to feel anything. None of this is hard. All of it is, weirdly, the part of the beach the bagno was preventing.

We live 50 meters from the sea, so it’s a bit unfair to tell you how we do this, but I’m gonna tell you anyway. We have a designated white bed sheet that we use for the beach. Yes, a simple cotton sheet, whatever. We bring two towels and a bag of goodies with water. We walk through a free passage (every beach has a free passage to the sea between 5-10 bagnos), sit down on the beach, not in a bagno. No sun-shade, no sun-bed, why need? Depending on our mood, the weather, and whatever we feel, we either stay for the entire day doing nothing, or just a couple of hours. We sometimes feel like we need food or coffee, so we just walk to the nearest bagno bar and grab something there. We do the bathroom stuff at home or at the bagno when we eat there.

Some bagnos ask 100 or 200 euros a day for a sunbed. Some ask even more. These are all paid for by tourists, vacationers, and visitors. I would be surprised if there’s a single local here who pays a fee for bagnos.

And lastly, the most local thing I saw once on the beach. A papa brought his own foldable armchair and a mini-fridge with beers in it. He walked past one of the most expensive bagnos here, which has white linen sunshades and big family-sized beds, and a Michelin-recommended restaurant with a pool in it, calmly walked past all of these, then, like a revolutionary, unfolded his chair at the end of the umbrella-forest, sat down facing the sea, and in total chill, finished his 6 beers from his fridge.

I am considering buying an armchair like that.

From Marina di Pietrasanta, where I live, you can see these quarries every day if you walk far enough out on the pontile at Tonfano and turn around. The Versilia coast is a long, flat strip of beach with the Apuan Alps rising behind it, and on certain mornings, the snow on the Apuans is not snow but marble, and the slopes that look like ski runs are ravaneti, the white spill of waste rock that the quarrymen leave behind. You can live here for a long time and not register that what you are looking at every morning is the inside of a mountain that has been opened and is being eaten.

I had come up to eat fat.

This is, in my limited defense, the way a Hungarian thinks. Where I come from we cure pork fat in paprika and garlic and we eat it raw on bread with raw onion and we consider this a form of national accomplishment, and I had been told for two years by everyone around me in Versilia that the lardo of Colonnata was the best cured fat in Italy, possibly in the world, and that the people of Colonnata had been making it the same way for as long as anyone could remember.

Miners, the people on the coast called them, though the men who work the marble are not miners, and the word in Italian is cavatore, quarryman, the man who cuts the stone open. The cavatori of these mountains have been eating lardo since at least the Roman period, when they almost certainly invented it for the practical reason that they needed something dense and cheap and energetic to take to work, and pork fat keeps if you salt it heavily and tuck it somewhere cold, and the inside of a marble cave is cold all year. The local method, refined over centuries and now protected by an IGP designation, is to layer the fat with rosemary, garlic, pepper, and other spices that no producer will tell you about completely, and to pack it into rectangular tubs cut from a particular kind of local marble called conca, and to leave it there for at least six months, sometimes a year, in a cool dark room. The marble does something to the fat that wood or steel does not do. The cavatori figured this out a thousand years before anyone wrote a book about flavor.

Colonnata itself takes about fifteen minutes to walk. It is built on a steep slope, the houses leaning into one another along three or four narrow streets, and on the wall of one of those streets, just below a window with a row of geraniums, someone had painted in faded red the words Via degli Anarchici, the street of the anarchists, with a small hammer and sickle next to the lettering. I stopped to read it. I have read enough about the history of this corner of Italy to know that when an anarchist symbol goes up on a wall in a Carrara village, it is not a tourist gesture, and it is not nostalgia.

The anarchist movement in Italy, one of the largest and oldest such movements anywhere, was founded by the men who cut these mountains. The Federazione Anarchica Italiana, the FAI, was founded in Carrara in September 1945, in the months after the Liberation, by men who had spent the war fighting in the Apuan Alps with the partisans and who came down off the mountain with an idea about how to live afterward. That history is not in a museum here. It is on the wall of a side street, painted by hand, next to someone’s geraniums.

I ate at a small place on one of the streets above the parking lot. I had walked past it twice before going in because it looked like the kind of room that would not have a menu in English and might not have one at all, and this turned out to be correct. There were four tables. The man behind the counter was probably my age, working a slicer in the slow, careful way of someone who has done it for thirty years, and when I asked for the lardo pasta, he nodded once, said cinque minuti, and turned away. I sat down. There was a woman at the next table eating by herself, no phone, a glass of red wine, and a plate of something with greens in it, and she looked at me once and went back to her food. The man brought a basket of bread first and then, after about the five minutes he had promised, a plate of penne tossed in nothing more than its own starch and a generous shaving of lardo melted into it from the heat of the pasta, with a few grains of black pepper and what looked like a single small leaf of rosemary on top. He did not bring cheese. He did not offer cheese. There are dishes in Italy where cheese is an active offense and this was one of them.

The fat had dissolved into the pasta and the pasta was not a vehicle for sauce, it was a vehicle for fat, and the fat tasted of pork and rosemary and garlic and salt and something I can only call mineral, the same word that came back to me when I had smelled the air on the way up, the taste of cool stone where something had rested for a long time. I have eaten fat my whole life. I have eaten my grandmother’s zsír on toasted bread in winter, with raw onion and pickle, and I would not insult my grandmother by saying anyone makes a better cured fat than she did, but I will say that what I had in front of me in Colonnata was the smoothest and most quietly devastating cured pork I had ever put in my mouth, and that whatever the marble does to fat, it works.

I sat with that plate for a long time. I drank a glass of the local red, which was red without being polished, the way a coffee at a workers’ bar is coffee without being polished. The woman at the next table finished and left. Two men came in and sat at the counter and did not order anything, just stood there talking to the man with the slicer in a dialect I couldn’t follow, and at one point they all laughed, and it was the laugh of three men who had grown up on the same hill. I paid in cash. The man asked me where I was from. I said Hungary, lived in Marina di Pietrasanta. He said anche da noi si mangia bene, also at our place one eats well, which was the closest thing to advertising I had heard him do in the half hour I had been there, and which was also true.

Driving down from Colonnata, you pass the quarries again, and the air does something to the windshield, a fine dust that the wipers do not entirely remove and that the locals call marmettola. It collects on cars. It collects in the rivers. The Frigido and the Carrione, the two streams that come out of these mountains, run white in certain weeks, and the work that is being done up here to extract the marble is not the slow, honorable work of Michelangelo’s day. Most of what comes off these mountains now is not statue-grade stone; it is calcium carbonate destined for toothpaste, cosmetics, and industrial paint, and the cavatori who die at work, and a handful of them die every year, are not dying in the service of art. The man at the bar of the next paese down would tell you this if you asked, in language that would not be diplomatic. The mountain is being eaten, and the people doing the eating are not the people doing the cutting.

By the time I came down into Carrara itself, the road had flattened, and the air had thinned of dust, and I parked near Piazza Gramsci, named for the founder of the Italian Communist Party, who is buried in Rome but whose name presides over the central square here without irony. There is no Piazza Gramsci in Forte dei Marmi, ten kilometers down the coast, where the same mountain delivers the marble used in the bathrooms of the villas where the Milanese spend August. Forte dei Marmi has Gucci, Louis Vuitton, and a beach club where an umbrella for the day costs more than the lardo pasta I had just eaten, and Carrara has Piazza Gramsci. I sat down at a bar on the square and asked for an espresso, and what came was the strongest coffee I had drunk in months, almost black-purple, the kind of coffee a man drinks at five in the morning before going up the hill in a truck. The bar was simple. The chairs were plastic. The clientele at four in the afternoon was three older men in work clothes who had clearly been at the same table for a while and who were arguing without rancor about something I could not catch. Nobody looked at me twice. There is a particular relief in this, in being a foreigner in a place that is too busy with its own life to perform for you.

I have now lived for several years on this coast, and I have come to feel a particular affection for Carrara that I do not feel for the more decorated towns nearby. It is not the affection of solidarity, because I am not a quarryman and I do not come from quarrymen. My people were farmers and lower-middle-class intellectuals on the Hungarian plain, and I will not pretend to a heritage I do not have. It is something more like respect for a place that has not bothered to translate itself for me. The men in Carrara are direct. They say what they think. They sell you what you ordered and not what they have in the back. The food is honest in the way an old tool is honest, no decoration, the handle worn to the shape of the hand that has used it. After three years among the polish of Versilia, the bar in Carrara felt like a window left open in a hot room.

The drive home took me along the coast road through Marina di Massa, the seaside that belongs to Massa, the city next door to Carrara, and where the cavatori go. Marina di Massa does not look like Forte dei Marmi. It looks like the Hungarian holiday camps of my childhood at Lake Balaton, and I mean that as a compliment, because what it is is a working family’s summer: large unfussy hotels, big campsites under the umbrella pines, ex-corporate colonie where the children of FIAT employees in Turin were sent for two weeks of sea air in August all the way through the 1980s, some of which still operate. The pontile in the middle of town juts out over the water, and on the day I drove past it was full of fishermen at four in the afternoon, the way it always is, and they had set up the long counterweighted nets that the men of this coast call bilance and were waiting for whatever the tide would bring. The shipyard at Marina di Carrara, just up the road, is one of the largest in Italy, and on the same drive, two superyachts were sitting in the dry dock waiting to be finished and delivered to people who will never set foot in a colonia in their lives. The same coastline. The same five kilometers.

I crossed back into Versilia just before sunset, and the light was coming low and pink across the Apuans, the way it does on clear evenings, and the white scars on the mountain caught it and held it, and from the angle of the coast road, they looked, for a moment, almost beautiful. I do not know whether they are beautiful. I know that the men who cut them have not been asked. I know that the fat I had eaten earlier in the day had been cured by people who live in the white snow that is not snow, and that the pasta had cost me maybe 12 euros, and that the espresso in Carrara had cost me one euro, and that the woman in the bar had handed me my change without smiling, the way you hand change to a regular, and that this had been one of the kindest gestures I had received in a long time.

There was still some of the day left when I got home. I went out to the kitchen, and I cut a piece of bread, and I poured a glass of the same red I had drunk in Colonnata, which I had bought a bottle of on the way out, and I sat on the terrace and watched the light go off the mountain. The fat had done what fat is supposed to do. It had held the day inside it.

Brits usually get this. A British family goes to the pub. The good local pub looks like a living room on purpose. An Italian family goes to the trattoria. The trattoria is where birthdays happen, where engagements are announced, where the funeral lunch is held three hours after the service, where a man who has not seen his cousin in two years sits down across from him and orders the wine before either of them has spoken.

People here will take out a small personal loan to keep eating out with their friends during a hard month. Nobody borrows money for a television. They borrowed money for the table. It’s that serious business.

This matters because the question of where to eat in an Italian town is not, fundamentally, a question of food. It is a question of whether you are sitting inside the social fabric or outside of it. A bad Italian restaurant just feeds you.

What follows is a list, and like most lists about Italy, it is not a set of rules but a set of warning signs. None of them is absolute. A restaurant on the main piazza can be excellent. A waiter who speaks English fluently can be the owner's son who studied in London for three years. A long menu can mean a big kitchen and not a freezer full of ravioli. The signals are weighted, and you read them together, and the more of them a place trips, the further you walk before you sit down.

I’ll start at the top.

The location. A restaurant’s location, in Italy, is real estate, and real estate has a price, and that price has to come back out of the kitchen one way or another. There is a reason McDonald’s puts its franchises at the busiest intersections in town: foot traffic is a margin you don’t have to earn twice. When a restaurant sits on the main piazza of a famous commune, with three hundred people walking past it at any given hour, the rent is enormous, and the kitchen has to either charge you for the rent or save somewhere else, and saving somewhere else means the produce, the wine, the cook. Sometimes the location is worth it. Sometimes the view of a thousand-year-old church is, in fact, what you came for, and you should be allowed to pay for it. But a meal on the main square should be a conscious decision made with eyes open, not the default. Walk one block off the piazza. Walk two. The price drops, the locals appear, the food gets better. This is almost a mathematical law.

The clientele. I do not say this to be condescending, but you can tell. Italians, even on a Saturday afternoon in jeans, dress in a particular register: long cotton trousers, a shirt of some kind, leather shoes that have been worn before; the women in something elegant without being formal, a dress, a scarf, a pair of earrings worth noticing. They do not wear baseball caps to lunch. They do not wear sandals with white socks, which is the German tell. They do not wear the cargo shorts with the seven side-pockets and the zip-off legs, which is the American tell. They do not wear a t-shirt with the name of an American university on it. If you stand in the doorway of a restaurant at 1pm on a Tuesday, scan the room, and see more cargo shorts than long trousers, you have your answer. Walk on. The food may be perfectly fine. It will not be the food that gets cooked when the cook is making it for his neighbors.

The calendar. Look at the door. There should be a small printed sign with the orari di apertura and, somewhere, the giorni di chiusura. A restaurant that closes from October to April is not a restaurant. It is a tourist concession, and the difference between the two is enormous. A real Italian restaurant is open all year. It is open during the dead weeks of February, when the streets are empty, and the only customers are the four men at the back table who have been eating there every Wednesday since 1991. It is open because being open all year, with a kitchen that cooks the same things for the same people, is the only way the food stays alive. The seasonal places, by contrast, run on a fundamentally different model: closed half the year, reopened to a flood of strangers, the kitchen has no continuity, the menu has been printed in the spring and shipped out frozen, and you can taste it the moment the pasta arrives. The same dry penne, sauced three different ways, all of them finishing at the same temperature. A real kitchen does not work like that.

The menu. Here you have to read carefully, because the obvious tells are not the most reliable. A menu translated into English does not condemn a restaurant; almost every place in a town with any traffic has one, and the great places sometimes have one too out of basic courtesy. The same goes for the waiter who can take your order in three languages — young Italians often speak two or three foreign languages competently, especially on the coast, and this signals nothing in particular. What you are looking for is something quieter. You are looking for a small place with a long menu, which is almost always a signal that most of the food is moving from the freezer to the microwave, because no kitchen of four square meters can do justice to forty dishes from raw materials. You are looking for a menu that is suspiciously complete, has a little of everything, and tries to please everyone. The best places have ten things on the menu. Eight of them are local. The eleventh item is a fish that came in this morning, written by hand on a piece of paper clipped to the inside of the leather folder.

The provenance. This is connected to the menu, but it deserves its own line, because Italian identity, more than almost any other national identity, is constructed regionally rather than nationally. A Tuscan eats Tuscan. A Ligurian eats Ligurian. A Roman, a Neapolitan, a Sicilian, a Friulano: each of them eats what their grandmother cooked, and the grandmother cooked what her grandmother cooked, and the chain runs back to the medieval period. So when you walk into a trattoria in coastal Tuscany, and the menu offers you both amatriciana (Roman) and bolognese (Emilian) and trippa alla fiorentina (Florentine) and a Neapolitan-style pizza and a Ligurian pesto, you are not in a restaurant that has cleverly curated the best of Italy. You are in a restaurant that has correctly assessed that the foreigners walking past the door do not know the difference, and is selling them whatever they have heard of. Italians do, of course, eat across regions: a Tuscan at home will gladly eat sushi, will try a Neapolitan pizza, and will go to a Roman restaurant when he is in Rome. But the restaurant he goes to in his own town, on a Tuesday, will serve him what his town has always cooked. Anything else is a tell.

The kitchen’s tools. This one is harder to verify from the doorway, but the signal works because Italian cooks are, like all serious craftsmen, vain about their equipment. If a pizzeria has a wood-fired oven, it will be photographed on the website, mentioned on the front of the menu, and visible from the front door. If a steakhouse cooks its bistecca alla fiorentina over wood, the grill will be displayed, the wood will be stacked nearby like a small architectural feature, and the carne hanging in a glass case will be lit like jewelry. These are not investments a kitchen makes and then hides. They are signals to the local clientele that the cook understands how the food should be made, is making it that way, and is willing to spend money to do it. So: a pizzeria with no wood-fired oven and only an industrial steel oven is not a pizzeria, in the sense that matters. A steakhouse without big lumps of dry-aged steaks hanging publicly is not a steakhouse. The cook is not lying, exactly. He is simply not committing.

The reservation. If it is Friday or Saturday evening in any commune of any reputation, and you walk up to a restaurant at 8:00pm without a booking and they sit you down immediately, you have your answer. Italians eat out on weekends. The good places are full. They have been full since Wednesday afternoon, when the regulars phoned in. If you can sit, it is not because you are lucky. It is because the restaurant has empty tables on a Saturday in a town where no restaurant should have empty tables on a Saturday, and the reason it has empty tables is that nobody who lives nearby wants to eat there. The fix is simple. Book a day ahead. Most places now take WhatsApp messages. The Fork app works. Google works. Even calling, in halting Italian, works — the Posso prenotare per due, sabato sera, alle otto? is a sentence anyone can manage, and the reaction on the other end of the line tells you something about the place before you have even arrived.

There are obvious traps that this list will also catch, almost by accident.

• The fixed menu turistico on a chalkboard outside, with a wilted picture of pasta on it.

• The carbonara at €22 and the bottle of water at €5.

• The plate of garlic bread offered as an antipasto, which is not an Italian dish and never has been. The same goes for Alfredo or spaghetti meatballs.

• The menu printed in English first, German second, French third, Italian last, and in italics.

• The young man on the corner of the piazza in the apron, calling out to passing couples in five languages, trying to wave them in.

These are not warnings, these are confessions. You walk past them without slowing down. They are not what we are talking about here.

What we are talking about, in this list, is something subtler and more important. We are not just talking about how to avoid being robbed. We are talking about how to find your way inside an Italian town’s table — the place where the regulars are eating, where the waiter knows the cook’s mother, where the same four men have sat at the same table on Wednesday for thirty years.

Because that is the reason, finally, to travel at all. Not to consume a culture, but to sit down inside it for an hour. To order what the man at the next table is ordering. To pay the same price he paid. To leave, eventually, the way he leaves, with a hand raised at the door and a grazie, ci vediamo, see you next time. A restaurant is not about eating food. A restaurant is a melting pot of local culture.

We are originally Hungarians. We do not believe in sweet breakfasts. We have lived here three years, and we still do not believe in them, but on this one morning a week, with the market noise drifting across the piazza and the vigili finishing their first pass of the streets in their reflective vests, we participate in this error and find that it is not entirely an error after all. The cornetto holds together for the first three bites. After the third bite, it becomes a piece of soaked bread, which is the point of dipping it. The man at the table next to ours is reading La Nazione with his thumb pressing the page flat against the wind, and his espresso has been sitting on the saucer untouched for four minutes, which means he is from here.

Marina di Pietrasanta is not a town. It is the seaside of a town. The town is twenty minutes inland by bicycle, and it has its own piece on this site. The marina is something else, four small frazioni stitched together along five kilometers of sand between Forte dei Marmi and Lido di Camaiore. From north to south: Fiumetto, Tonfano, Motrone, Le Focette. They are the same place, and they are not the same place. Fiumetto has the pineta and D’Annunzio’s villa. Le Focette has the old nightclub where Mina sang in 1962. Motrone is where the river once flowed before the Americans buried it during the war, so they could land scout planes on what is now the soccer field. Tonfano is where I am sitting. The center of it, if a place this small can be said to have a center, is the piazza two minutes from where I sleep, which has the pontile at one end and a cluster of bars and a porchetteria at the other. Most of what happens here happens between those two points.

The market arrives every Saturday and leaves the same afternoon. It is run by a small group of vendors who set up at six, sell until two, are gone by three, and by four the streets have been swept and the parking restrictions are lifted with a German sort of precision that does not fit anything else about this country.

Sophia and I finish the coffee and walk into the noise. We know every meter of it. Three years of the same stalls, the same vendors, the same loud and terrible house music coming from the speakers of the two brothers who sell secondhand clothes and have apparently never agreed, in their whole working lives together, on a single song that anyone over thirty would want to hear. They wave. We wave back. I have bought four shirts from Casati Milano's pop-up, and Sophia has filled half her closet with pieces from the vintage rack at the far end. The salumeria man (Marco) recognizes us from fifteen meters away and is already cutting something I did not order, because every month I bring him a bottle of Tokaji from Hungary, and every month he repays me with finocchiona and pieces of pecorino I would not have known to ask for. He says ciao bello without looking up. I have learned to say ciao bello back without breaking stride.

By the vegetable stand, we collect four bags for ten euros, and by the time we reach the rotisserie ladies at the end, I have stopped counting what we have. The ladies know us. They shout numbers at the line and dimmi caro at us, and one of them packs the chicken into foil while another scoops fried zucchini and salsiccia into a paper bag that is already translucent with grease. The chicken is spiced with something I have given up trying to identify. We do not roast our own anymore. There would be no point.

We take the bags home and eat lunch at the kitchen table with the windows open to the piazza. Outside, the market is finishing. The umbrellas are coming down, the vans are pulling up, and below all of it, faintly, the sea is doing what the sea does.

The marsh is still here, by the way. Not visibly. But underneath. This whole strip of sand was a malarial wetland until Cosimo di Medici started draining it in the sixteenth century, and Leopoldo II had to come back and finish the job in the nineteenth. The Tonfano River, which gave Tonfano its name, was buried in the 1940s by American soldiers who needed a flat strip for reconnaissance aircraft. What was left of the smaller fossi was filled in over the decades that followed with marmettola, the pulverized waste of the marble quarries six kilometers inland. Which means that everything I am walking on, when I walk to the pontile, is reclaimed swamp filled with the dust of the white mountain. The tourists do not know this. Most of the people who live here do not know this. But the ground remembers, in the way ground does, and the houses settle in their own quiet directions, and the irrigation ditches that survived run faintly green between the hotels and the villini.

In May, the bagni are mostly closed, or half-open, or being painted by a man on a stepladder while another man holds the ladder steady and reads a newspaper. The sand has not yet been graded by the small tractors that come every morning in June. The sea is not warm. Italians from Florence, Pisa, and Lucca, who own villini here that have been in their families for two and three generations, walk along the battigia in light jackets, and the few foreigners are mostly German, already in the water because they are German.

Sophia and I bring an old white bedsheet, two bottles of water, a book, and the last edition of the local paper (I learn Italian from it), and walk past the closed gates of three bagni until we reach a stretch where nobody minds. The towel goes down past the last row of folded loungers. The sun is direct but not punishing. I read for twenty minutes, and at some point, I fall asleep briefly and wake to the sound of two children speaking Florentine to a small dog. Time has passed. The light has shifted by maybe ten degrees. The sea has come up another half-meter.

This is not Forte dei Marmi. Forte is the marina that got rich on the same coast, and it is full of Russians and concept stores and a market on Wednesdays where the cashmere is real, and the cashmere is also fake, and it is wonderful in its own way, and I have written about it elsewhere. Marina di Pietrasanta is its quieter cousin. It is mostly residential. Three streets and a pedestrian via, the Via Versilia, where the restaurants are. The Carlino is here, where the cacciucco on Sundays is the reason you come back. The Cafè Versilia is here, and the porchetteria on the main square, where, when I asked the owner if they ever put cheese in the panino with the porchetta, the way they do in Rome, he looked at me for a full second and said: No. Tuscan porchetta is meat. We add more meat. That is all. I have not asked again.

The bike path runs from Marina di Carrara in the north to the harbor of Viareggio in the south, thirty kilometers of separated lane along Viale Roma and its various names, and on Sunday morning, if Saturday’s beach was lazy, we ride. Toward Forte dei Marmi, the road passes the Versiliana, eighty hectares of macchia mediterranea and umbrella pines that survived, mostly, the wind storm of March 2015, after which the locals stopped saying bosco and started saying quel che resta del bosco, what’s left of the forest. D’Annunzio wrote La pioggia nel pineto in the villa inside it, in 1902, lying around with Alessandra Carlotti di Rudinì in some condition of summer indolence I cannot read about without becoming irritated, and every July the Festival della Versiliana sets up a stage among the pines and runs concerts until September. We saw Carmina Burana there once. The mosquitoes were terrible. The music carried.

The geese live in the park. They do not know they live in the park. On weekday mornings, they wander out onto Viale Apua, six or seven of them in single file, the kind of line geese make when geese have decided where they are going, and the cars coming down the four-lane stop. Not honk. Stop. The gang of geese takes its time. They cross at goose-pace, which is the slowest reasonable pace at which an animal that can fly is willing to walk, and the drivers in their Fiat Pandas wait with the resigned good humor of people who have seen this before and will see it again, and after a long minute, the last goose makes the curb and the line of cars moves on. I have stopped finding this remarkable. It is one of the small adjustments the place asks of you, and you make it, and after a while, you forget it was an adjustment.

If you cross the Versiliana into Forte, you are in another country. Hotels, Russians, the Wednesday market, the closed-off feeling of a town that has decided what it is. If you ride south instead, past Le Focette and into Lido di Camaiore, you pass another country, the family-vacation country, the bagno country with the inflatable slides and the entertainers in matching shirts, and beyond that Viareggio, which is a city, with everything a city has, including a harbor and a cat called Ettore who lives at the end of the breakwater and who has, in his own way, become a destination.

Marina di Pietrasanta is between these two. It has the residentiality of neither. Most hotels here are small and old. The houses are villini, modest by the standards of this coast, often closed from October to May, owned by families from the inland cities who come down for the weekend in cars too clean to have come from anywhere with bad weather.

In summer, of course, it changes. By the time Ferragosto arrives in the second week of August, it is unlivable, in the literal sense that we cannot live here, and Sophia and I leave for England every year and do not come back until the first week of September, when the season has cracked, and the place exhales.

The beach clubs are open, but in a way I do not enjoy. La Bussola, on the Focette side, was Sergio Bernardini’s club from 1955, and Mina sang there, and Celentano, and Vanoni, and the entire pop canon of an Italy that does not exist anymore, and the building still stands and is still run. The Twiga is here, Briatore’s bagno, with the prices that make Forte people feel they are slumming. The Faruk, the Bussola Park, where they bring in summer concerts, this year I think Nick Cave.

The marina has its nightlife. We mostly do not have it. We have a small bar called Lo Studio, which is what we have instead, run by a man whose family used to own the building that is now the Margherita, who sold it for what must have been a great deal of money and used the proceeds, as far as anyone can tell, to open a place that exists for the purpose of letting him dress as a clown and serve cocktails to his friends. The cocktails are excellent. The clown costume is real. The space is some hybrid of bar, antique shop, concert venue, and circus, and the logic of it is: I have made my money, now, I will have fun. It is among the most Italian things I have ever encountered.

We have a butcher, Angelo, from whom we buy the meat. We have a hairdresser, Michela, whom Sophia goes to and waits and chats and waits some more. We have a farmacia where the woman behind the counter knows what Sophia takes for her allergies and starts pulling it down before Sophia has finished saying buongiorno. None of this is unique. This is what every small Italian commune offers, eventually, to anyone who stays long enough. What is unique to here is what is two minutes’ walk from my front door, which is the pontile of Tonfano, two hundred meters of concrete pier walked into the sea, and the bronze statue of Sant’Antonio submerged just south of it that you can see only when the water is calm, the head of the saint looking up through the green-gray.

Sophia and I have a theory we developed in Budapest. We used to live in a house above the city, with a terrace, and a view that was, by any reasonable measure, extraordinary. Six months in, we stopped going out onto the terrace. A year in, we forgot the view was there. You get used to anything. The place becomes the place where you live, and the extraordinary thing about it becomes the thing that is just behind the door, the way the sound of a refrigerator stops being the sound of a refrigerator after the second day.

I am writing this from my bedroom. The end of the pontile of Tonfano is a five-minute walk from where I am sitting, and the sea is doing its work in a low rhythm I can hear if I listen for it, and the market is gone, and the streets have been swept, and the parking is allowed again. By the theory, I should have gotten used to it. By the theory, I should have stopped noticing. I have not. I do not know when it will happen, or if it will.

Last night at sunset, I walked to the end of the pier with Sophia, and we stood there while the sun went into the sea behind the breakwater of Carrara, and I thought, again, the same thing I think most evenings: this is where I live. I still do not believe it.

We keep pedaling. This is the move.

The first time I did this ride I thought I understood what Forte dei Marmi was by the time I reached Piazza Garibaldi, and I was wrong. You have to do it a few times before you start to see the thing underneath. The thing underneath is that this is not Portofino, it is not Capri, it is not Porto Cervo or San Remo, and every comparison people reach for when they try to describe it to somebody who hasn’t been is misleading in a specific way. All of those places got rich off something visible: a natural harbor, a cliff, a view, a port for large boats. Portofino is a postcard you pay to enter. Forte dei Marmi has a small harbor, a handful of five-star hotels that are mostly palazzos converted room by room, no cliffs, no vista, and an airport that is further from it than Naples is from Capri.

You cannot really fly here. There is nothing dramatic to photograph from the air. And yet everyone with serious money in northern Italy owns, or has rented, or is waiting for their friend to leave so they can rent, a villa here. The Agnellis have a villa. The industrial families of Turin and Milan built their summers around this grid of streets. Thomas Mann came. Aldous Huxley came. Henry Moore came. Luchino Visconti came. The Capannina di Franceschi, a short walk from where we are now pedaling, has been operating as a beach-club-nightclub-restaurant since 1929 and is the oldest continuously operating one in the world, and it has been the social coordinate of Italian summer for almost a century (note: bought by Giorgio Armani in 2025, sadly he died weeks later, now it is closed for renovation). None of this is a secret. It is simply not legible from the outside.

We turn into the back streets of Roma Imperiale and the villas get serious. This is the reason to come on a bike. A car cannot do this. A car has to stay on the main roads and has to park somewhere, and the whole pleasure of Forte is moving slowly past houses you are not going to enter. On a bike you can drift. You can stop in front of one because the line of the roof is unusual and you want to look at it for another thirty seconds. You can take the next turn at random because there is no reason not to. Some of the villas were designed by the architects whose names you would recognize if you cared about twentieth-century Italian architecture, Gio Ponti, Michelucci, Pagano. Most of the ones you pass are just the work of good local architects doing the job well for clients who did not intend to live in the house more than six weeks a year. Almost none of them are lived in permanently. This is a town of ten-bedroom mansions whose point is a holiday. I think about this a lot on these rides. The idea of building a ten-bedroom mansion so that you can be in it for six weeks is the kind of thing that does not feel entirely possible until you ride a bike past thirty of them in an afternoon.

We end up, as we always end up, at the Fortino, which is the small eighteenth-century fortress at the center of Piazza Garibaldi and which has given the town its name. Forte dei Marmi means the fort of the marbles, and it is called that because before this place was a summer resort for anybody it was a shipping yard for the marble quarried out of the Apuan Alps above us, the same mountains that gave Carrara its white walls and gave Pietrasanta its sculptors’ workshops. The fort was a customs post and a warehouse. The pier down the road was there to load marble onto ships. The town itself, as a town, did not exist. It was a warehouse with a fort next to it. The first villas came because a few rich families in the 1800s decided the sea air was good for them. The second wave came because those families had friends. The third wave came because those friends’ children discovered the Capannina. Everything after that is a story about people who already have money choosing to spend August in a place that other people with money have already chosen.

We lock the bikes against a rail on the piazza, though I always wonder why we bother. Nobody is stealing a bicycle in Forte dei Marmi. The risk calculation does not pencil out for anyone who has wandered into this part of town. Caffè Roma is on the corner and it is where we always go, because it sits at the angle of the piazza that gives you the whole square at once, the fort on your left and the shops running away to the right and the slow promenade of people between them. We order coffee, and the waiter does not hurry, and we settle in.

This is where the thinking happens.

You watch, for an hour, and you start to sort the crowd. There is the thin seam of Italians who actually live in Forte year-round, who are mostly old, who know each other, who nod. There are the summer Italians, who come down for a week or a month and who dress extravagantly but in a way that is not trying to prove anything to you. There are the French from Monaco who drive up with license plates that say so, and they are quiet and well-groomed and a little bored.

And there are the Russians. I should say this plainly. You can pick them out from two hundred meters. They are louder than anybody else on the piazza. They dress expensively and badly at the same time, which is a difficult thing to do and requires real commitment. They drive the enormous black SUVs that are parked two wheels up on the curb at the top of the pedestrian zone, the ones that no Italian would ever drive to a piazza this small. The age-gap couples, the silver-haired man and the woman in the cocktail dress at three in the afternoon, those are almost always Russian, and almost always the man is silent and the woman is the one who speaks, and when she does it is not in Italian. I did not know, before I lived near here, that there are around five hundred Russian and Ukrainian families who live in or rent villas in Forte. I did not know that in 2008 Roman Abramovich anchored a yacht offshore and couldn’t get a dinner reservation, and that the story of that snub is what put the town on the Russian map in the first place. I noticed the people before I knew any of this, and now that I know it, it makes sense of what I was noticing. In March, when no Italian comes here to vacation, the Russian voices are the main voices on the street, because the Russians are the ones who actually live here twelve months a year. In July, when the Italians arrive, the Russian voices don’t disappear, they just get folded into the general sound. You can hear them if you listen. I am not going to be diplomatic about this. They are the rudest and most conspicuous part of the town, and the town has arranged itself around their money, and every boutique in the old center now stocks for a wallet that does not check its balance after buying a Rolex. But there is a reason why “normal” Italians usually don’t come here, only maybe by bike, like us.

The weekly antique market, which sets up every week on Piazza Dante, a few streets over from where we are drinking coffee, is where I feel this most clearly. It is not a flea market. It is an open-air interior-design showroom for people furnishing third houses. Gilt chairs from Piedmont, Murano chandeliers, a nineteenth-century writing desk, a pair of framed architectural drawings, a set of Florentine candlesticks that an old family is quietly dismantling and selling. We never buy anything. We walk through the way you walk through a small museum, resting our eyes on objects that have survived four or five owners and will survive four or five more. You can do this for an hour and then walk back to the piazza for another coffee, and it costs you nothing. The galleries, on the other hand, are mostly loud and modern and not to our taste, because a lot of the money that commissions contemporary art in this part of the world has no taste. This is not a theory. You walk in, you look, you walk out. Everybody is polite. Nobody minds.

The cookies arrive. The light on Piazza Garibaldi in the late afternoon is a specific yellow that the walls of the Fortino hold for about an hour before it tips into evening. A woman at the next table is explaining something to a younger man, in Italian, gently, and he is nodding. A child is chasing a pigeon. The waiter reappears and clears the empty cup without being asked. I think, as I always think when we are sitting here, that I like having this town ten minutes from my house, and I also think that I would never want to live inside it, and these two facts do not contradict each other. The town is a place to visit the way you visit a very expensive shop you cannot afford and do not need to enter. You walk the aisles, you admire the things, you leave. You ride your bike back through the scaling-down of the houses, the hedges shrinking, the cafés going back to the prices of cafés, and by the time you are home the ordinary world has resumed, and that is exactly the pleasure of it.

There is a sign somewhere in town, I have never been able to find it again, that I think said something about the fort being built in 1788 to defend the coast against pirates. I like that the word pirates was ever a serious concern for this place. I think about it sometimes when I pass an SUV with a Monaco plate.

I ride down most weekends when the weather allows it, and I mean the whole year, not just the summer. In August, I’m usually gone. We leave Italy for England for that month because the country where we actually live becomes, for four weeks, a country we no longer recognize.

The supermarkets fill up, the parking spaces disappear, you go to pick up bread and end up behind three foreign families arguing about sunscreen at the till. Most of the rest of the year, the Versilia is the opposite of this. Pietrasanta in February belongs to its people. The coast is almost empty. Even the restaurants relax. Lido di Camaiore in March has the air of a fairground the day after the carnival leaves town, slightly faded, slightly tired, entirely itself.

Viareggio is the exception. Viareggio is never empty.

It’s the biggest city on this coast, and the most famous. If you fly into Pisa to look at the tower, and then decide to see the sea before you leave, Viareggio is the sea you end up at. It has the most hotels, the most shops, the longest promenade, and it has the Carnevale, which is probably the second most famous carnival in Italy after Venice and which has now expanded, with a kind of cheerful shamelessness, to occupy the entire month of February, every weekend, corso after corso of giant papier-mâché floats rolling down the seafront in front of half a million people. I went once. The floats are enormous and funny and politically savage in the way only Italian satire gets to be, and the crowd is pressed in shoulder to shoulder for kilometers, and somewhere around the second hour, I understood that the next time I did this, I would do it from a balcony. A friend’s apartment, a rooftop bar, and an Airbnb rented for the day. Anywhere above the head. This is the rule for Viareggio in general. Whatever you came to see, try to see it from a little way up and a little way off.

The bike is the moving version of that principle.

You leave Lido di Camaiore’s long family promenade, with its orderly parasols and its gelato queues, and within a few minutes the city changes around you. The buildings go taller. The palms thicken. The front row of hotels along the Viareggio seafront starts to arrive one after the other, the Principe di Piemonte with its wedding-cake façade, the Grand Hotel Royal a few hundred meters later, and then the row of Liberty shopfronts and cafés that somebody rebuilt after the fire of 1917 burned the old wooden passeggiata to the ground. The man who repainted it was Galileo Chini, who had come back from Siam with a head full of Bangkok temples and used that vocabulary to rebuild the seafront of a Tuscan beach city in onion domes and glazed tile. The Gran Caffè Margherita has two of them, yellow and green, shaped like something out of a Wes Anderson fever dream. The Bagno Balena has an entire rotonda shaped like the front of a ship. The Magazzini Duilio 48 has wrought-iron flowers running up its façade and an interlaced monogram above the door that the builder tied with a ribbon. None of this is modest. None of it was meant to be. Viareggio rebuilt itself after the fire as the place where the cosmopolitan bourgeoisie of the early twentieth century came to swim, and the architecture is the memory of that ambition, still doing its job a hundred years later.

From the bike lane, with the sea on your right and the villas going past on your left, the whole row is like a Gatsby party seen through the window of a passing train. Long white fronts, balustrades, a glimpsed garden, and a doorman on the steps. You keep pedaling. You don’t stop. The stopping is what ruins it. The stopping is when you’re suddenly one of three hundred people on the same square meter of sidewalk trying to photograph the same façade, and the building stops being a building and becomes a backdrop. From the bike, you get the whole row in motion, the way it was designed to be seen, the way the people in the open cars of 1928 would have seen it. Grandiose and slightly unreal, and not asking anything of you except that you pass through it.

Behind the seafront, there is another Viareggio that almost nobody who comes for a day ever looks at. The residential Liberty streets, where Puccini had his drunken fights with Toscanini at the Caffè Margherita, and where the architecture gets denser and more private. Chini’s ceramic putti under the eaves of the Villino Flora. A dozen other villini up and down the back streets behind the promenade, most of them still lived in. I’ve ridden up and down those streets too. I love the huge stretch of Parco Pineta, a pine tree park with kids’ playgrounds and minigolf courses. They’re worth the detour. But they are not, in the end, the Viareggio I come for.

I come for the cat. Ettore.

Gatto Ettore sits at the end of the pier on a low bronze pedestal, upright, looking out to sea. He is small. You could miss him if you weren’t looking, which is part of why I love him. Ettore was a real cat. He lived on the pier, was fed by the fishermen, wove between their boots in the morning and slept on folded tarps in the afternoon, and when he died a local sculptor made a statue of him and put it here, at the point where the land stops, and somebody always puts flowers on it, or a small plastic fish, or a cigarette stubbed out at his feet. Every time I’ve ridden past him, there has been something. Viareggio’s Hachiko, if Hachiko had been a cat and had never waited for anyone because he’d decided a long time before that the fishermen were his tribe.

The cat is the threshold. He marks the place where Viareggio stops being a promenade city and starts being a working port. Turn right at the cat, and you’re at the molo, the long stone pier that runs out into the sea. Turn left, and you’re on the Canale Burlamacca, the canal that cuts the city in half, with the Darsena and the shipyards on the far bank. Either direction, everything gets more honest.

Along the short stretch of road behind the pier, there is a row of restaurants that all sell the same thing, which is the fish that came in that morning. My two are Tito del Molo and Il Delfino. Tito has a trick that is worth understanding before you go. It has two restaurants next door to each other, both under its name and run by the same kitchen, sharing, as far as I can tell, the same suppliers. One has white linen tablecloths, wooden chairs, and waiters in black shirts, and it costs roughly fifty percent more. The other has plastic chairs, plastic tables, no cloth, a counter where you order, a screen above the counter that calls your number when your food is ready, and a tray you carry to your own seat. The fish is the same fish. I cannot tell you loudly enough: get the plastic chair.

I had vongole there in March, and fried anchovies, and a small glass of white wine, and I ate them looking out at the boats tied along the quay. A pensioner was sitting at the next table with his wife, she had the calamari, he had the cacciucco, the Tuscan fish soup, and he ate it with the slow seriousness of a man who has been doing this once a week for forty years. Neither of them was in a hurry, nor was I.

This is the other great Viareggio rule: whatever is crowded on the promenade is not crowded at the harbor, because the two worlds overlap much less than a visitor would guess. The people at the linen tablecloth Tito are having dinner. The people at the plastic chair Tito are having lunch on the way somewhere else.

If you come to the pier before noon, you can still catch the fishermen selling their own catch. It’s not a market in any organized sense. It’s a boat tied up, a folding table set out on the quay next to it, a few paper trays of sardines and mussels and squid that are still moving, a hand-written price-per-kilo on a scrap of cardboard. A few euros a kilo for things that would cost four times that in a shop two streets inland. The fishermen do this for an hour, maybe two, and then the whole show is gone because the restaurants have already been down and bought up most of the good stock by eight, and the rest goes to whatever locals are paying attention to.

You can walk the molo afterward. It’s long, maybe half a kilometer, with the harbor on one side and the open sea on the other, and a lighthouse at the far end that turns out to be further away than you think. People walk it in the evening with cones of fried fish from one of the barchine del fritto, the small floating kiosks on the canal that sell a paper box of whatever came up that morning, squid rings, and small whole anchovies and a wedge of lemon, three or four euros. It is one of the genuine pleasures of this coast. You sit on a bollard at the end of the pier with the Apuan Alps lit orange behind you in the west, you unfold the paper, you eat a fried sardine with your fingers, and you understand, in a way that no restaurant ever quite teaches you, what the sea has to do with the kitchen.

But the best place in Viareggio is across the canal.

There is a pedestrian bridge at the far end of the molo that crosses the Burlamacca and drops you into the Darsena, the working industrial harbor. This is where the shipyards are. Viareggio builds yachts. It has built them since 1873, when the Benetti yard opened to build wooden fishing boats and, over the next hundred and fifty years, evolved into one of the four or five places on earth where people who can afford eighty-meter superyachts have them built. Azimut-Benetti, Sanlorenzo, Perini Navi, Overmarine, Codecasa. About a third of the world’s thirty-meter-plus yachts are built here, the vast majority of them for foreign buyers who will never set foot in the Darsena itself. If you walk the canal in the right stretch of afternoon, you can see them propped up on stilts inside the hangars with their hulls still raw, lit by the blue flash of welding torches, surrounded by men in overalls climbing ladders and talking on radios.

I like the Darsena more than the villas. It is rawer. It is still working. It is the part of Viareggio that doesn’t care whether you think it is beautiful.

And it is where my favorite restaurant in the city is: Il Capitano.

The drill at Il Capitano is the drill at all the good harbor places, which you only really understand after you’ve done it once. You walk in. There is a glass counter near the entrance with the day’s catch laid out on ice, most of it still twitching or at least still looking fresh enough that you believe it was alive two hours ago. Prawns, the color of a sunset. Mantis shrimp with their weird armored tails. Two or three kinds of bream. A small octopus. You choose by pointing. They weigh what you point at. They tell you the price. They cook it. You sit down. You drink the wine they recommend, which is almost always the house white by the carafe and which is almost always fine.

The best thing at Il Capitano is the cacciucco. It is the thing you should order if you order nothing else, which is not the advice I give lightly because there is a lot at the counter that is worth ordering. Cacciucco is the Viareggian fish soup, and it is built, correctly, out of the fish the market didn’t sell. The cheapest species, the ones with the most bones and the strongest flavor. Scorpion fish. Gurnard. Cuttlefish. Mantis shrimp. Mussels, if they’re good that day. The broth is heavy with tomato and chili and garlic and a bottom-note of something deeper, probably the shells, probably the things you don’t want to look at too closely. It arrives in a wide bowl, with a piece of toasted, stale bread sitting in the middle, because the bread is what originally turned a plate of fish scraps into a meal. You tear the bread apart and let it soak. You eat with a spoon. You do not speak for ten minutes.

Around me, the last time I was there, were four men in the navy-blue overalls of one of the yards across the canal, eating cacciucco at a round table near the door and speaking the dense, swallowed Versilian that almost nobody outside this strip of coast understands. They had come in on their lunch break. They had been welding all morning. They would go back and weld all afternoon. The soup was the fuel. One of them noticed me noticing them and nodded. I nodded back. Neither of us said anything. It was the most Viareggio moment I have had in years of living here.

You can buy a five-hundred-euro cashmere jacket in Viareggio. You can stay at the Principe di Piemonte for a price that makes my eyes water. You can have dinner on the promenade with a view of the Liberty domes at sunset and pay, very happily, a hundred euros a head. These are real things about the city, and I don’t want to pretend they aren’t. They are what most visitors come for, what gets photographed, and what ends up on the front of the travel sections in London and Milan.

But that is not the Viareggio I come for, and it is not the Viareggio that runs Viareggio. The Viareggio that runs Viareggio is on the other side of the cat, in the Darsena, and it is made up of yacht welders and fishermen, the men at the plastic-chair Tito, and the women who set up folding tables on the quay at nine in the morning.

There is a saying, I think, maybe it’s a saying, or maybe it’s something people who live on mountains believe and tell themselves at night, that the sea gives generously where the mountains demand work. That the hillsides make you break your back for a basket of grapes, and the sea just hands you its bounty for the asking. This idea was clearly invented by someone who has never been to Viareggio. The sea does not give you anything. The sea is where you go at four in the morning in a wet sweater to pull up a net that may be empty, and where the man on the next boat has been doing this for thirty years and will be doing it for thirty more, and where the woman at the folding table on the quay by eight has hands you can feel from across the quay. The sea is smelly, heavy, dangerous, and unsentimental. The sea is a job.

And what you get out of that job, on a good day, if everything in the long chain of wet work has gone right, is a bowl of cacciucco in a restaurant across the canal, made by people whose grandparents did the same work, eaten by people who do the same work now, for a price that anyone in a navy-blue overall can afford on a lunch break. The richest coast in Italy runs on that bowl. The yachts are real, and the villas are real, and the Carnevale is real, but the engine underneath all of it is the fish market at nine, the fried sardines in paper, the soup at the plastic table in the Darsena. You can see it, if you want to, but you have to cross the canal to find it, and you have to know how to go past the cat.

The sun was going down behind the Apuan Alps the last time I biked home. The pier was emptying out. Somebody had left a sprig of rosemary and a fifty-cent coin at Ettore’s feet. I rode past him on the way back up the coast toward Lido di Camaiore, and the crowd on the promenade was the same crowd it had been on the way down, and I didn’t feel the need to stop. The city I’d come for was already behind me, on the other side of a bronze cat, in a bowl of soup, in the hands of a man in overalls picking the last of the bread out of the broth.

Coincidence, obviously. But it is the kind of coincidence that this region, which does not believe in coincidences, has decided to take seriously. You are eating the country. On the plate, from above, it is a map.

This is the most famous steak in Tuscany (maybe in the world), and it is the worst-cooked piece of beef in the world, because almost everyone who cooks it does something to it, and the entire point of the dish is that you do nothing to it.

That’s the whole recipe. I wish I were joking.

There is real beef involved, and we should be honest about that. A proper Fiorentina is cut from a Chianina cow, a breed so old it was herded across the Tuscan plains by butteri, the Maremma cowboys who arguably invented the whole profession. The line goes buttero, then Spanish ranchero, then Mexican vaquero, then the Texas cowboy in the John Wayne movie, and somewhere along the way, we lost sight of the fact that the man on the horse was originally Italian and was probably heading home to a two-kilo steak and a glass of Sangiovese.

The Chianina is the beef. The Maremma is the country. A good butcher will tell you the provenance without being asked. I get mine either from La Bisteccheria di Alan in Camaiore, which is a traditional Italian butcher shop of the kind that is slowly disappearing, or from Azienda Agraria La Valle near Aulla, which is a farm-shop where you can buy the meat and then, on a weekend, sit down on their lawn and cook it on an open fire next to four other families doing the same thing.

The cut matters. It is why it is called Fiorentina. A Fiorentina is a minimum of three fingers thick, measured by your own hand against the side of the steak. Thinner than three fingers, by Tuscan lore, it is no longer a steak. It is a carpaccio. The butcher, who knows what I am buying the meat for, always asks me when I plan to cook it. If the answer is within a few days, he tells me to keep it in the fridge on a plate, bone-side down, uncovered. No plastic. No paper. No oil. Let it breathe. Let it lose a little water. This is kinda like dry-aging, and it is the only thing you are allowed to do to the meat before the fire, which should tell you something. By default, the meat is dry-aged for a month or more when you buy it.

Everything after this is where people go wrong.

You want a charcoal grill, ideally with raw fresh wood if you want to argue with the purists, and you want to light it an hour and a half before you intend to cook. I have a small Weber grill, so I cook it over good-quality charcoal. You want the coals eight to ten centimeters below the grate, no live flame. You want the meat at room temperature, patted dry with a paper towel to take off the surface moisture. And you want, before the meat goes on, to resist every single thing that your instincts will tell you to do to it.

No salt. No pepper. No oil. No rub. No marinade. No crushed garlic. No rosemary. No Dijon mustard or whatever bullshit that some cookbook or fake-Italian told you about. Nothing. Don’t try to be Gordon Ramsay and soak everything in butter.

The meat goes on the grill naked, exactly the way it left the fridge, and if you hear yourself thinking, but a little olive oil would, you have already failed. Put it down. Just trust the meat.

Eight minutes on one side. Eight on the other. Eight to ten upright on the bone, so the fillet and the strip cook through evenly from below. The bone can burn — who cares? The outside should go almost black. Flames should punch up through the grate as the fat renders, and you should let them.

Essentially, as the Tuscans say, it’s baptism by fire.

Thirty minutes, start to finish, for a 1,2-1,5-kilo steak. Then onto a wooden or stone board to rest. Minimum of 10 minutes, let the meat wake up from the shock. Then cut into finger-thick slices against the grain.

And then, and only then, only at this point, you touch your spices. A generous pinch of flaky salt and a small pour of good olive oil across the slices. Pepper only if you insist. Nothing else.

If you did it right, the edges are charred and crunchy, the inside is pink, going to almost raw at the bone, and what’s on your plate tastes like meat. Not like marinade. Not like herbs. Not like a competent chef’s reinterpretation of what beef could be if it tried harder. Like meat. Which is the thing a Chianina cow spent five years becoming, and the thing a butcher spent three days letting dry, and the thing you spent thirty minutes not ruining.

The side is bread. Tuscan bread, unsalted, to tear and put under a slice of meat. If you must have something green, a plate of boiled erbe with salt. If you must have something starchy, a few fried potatoes. No sauce. Nothing to dip into. The wine is red, and it is bold, Chianti Classico if you’re being traditional. I lived in London for years, and Britain holds a very special place in my heart, so I usually pour a glass of Scotch, ideally from Islay. If my scotch doesn’t smell like burned sheep hide and grass, I don’t drink it. No ice, just a pinch of water, obviously.

You know you are eating with a Tuscan when they cut the meat, eat the slices, and then pick up the t-bone with both hands and chew the remaining meat off the bone at the table. I once watched a woman do this in a trattoria outside Firenze, a woman who looked like Monica Bellucci, holding a glass of red wine in one hand and the bone of her Fiorentina in the other and conducting a perfectly civilized conversation with her table through both of them. Not counting moments with my wife, this was one of the sexiest things I have ever seen.

A Fiorentina cannot be ordered well done. It cannot be ordered medium-well. It cannot be cooked to your preference. If you want a steak done to your preference, order the tagliata, which is the same cow, a smaller cut, and more permissive of personal taste. The Fiorentina is not a democracy. It is a constitution. You either eat it the one way it is meant to be eaten, or you eat something else.

The genius of the dish is that it is almost entirely a matter of restraint. Good beef, good fire, good salt. The end. Everything else is unnecessary. Chefs who cannot leave it alone, grill guys who want to impress you with their rub, cooks who cannot bear the thought of putting a piece of meat on a grate and walking away.

The Fiorentina is a statement against modernity.

PS: I highly recommend watching this video from a famous butcher, Dario Cecchini. He has a butcher shop and “restaurant” which he calls the “butcher’s table” between Firenze and Siena, in Panzano, a small village. He is something of a media celebrity, and his shop is crowded with tourists because of it, but the way he talks about meat and the art of butchery is still heartwarming.

He says that a sculptor leaves a beautiful statue, a painter leaves a wonderful painting, or a poet leaves their poetry. The butcher, on the other hand, is an artisan, and whatever an artisan creates, it doesn’t remain. The artisans' work remains only in the hearts of those who experience its artisanry. In this case, the Fiorentina.

I went home and looked at the map. Viareggio, then south along the coast toward Pisa, and there it was, a small dot sitting between a lake and the sea, with a road that went in and didn’t really come out the other side, except back onto the autostrada. We got in the car the next Sunday and drove down.

The drive from Viareggio is short and disorienting. You leave the promenade behind, the palm trees and the Liberty facades and the long row of identical bathing clubs, and within a few minutes, the scenery does something it isn’t supposed to do on this coast. It goes soft. The buildings thin out. The pines get taller and closer to the road. Canals appear on either side of the car, slow and green, then the canals widen and the road curves, and I realize we are driving on a causeway across something that used to be water. Which was because it used to be water.

The whole of Versilia was a swamp once, a long strip of malarial lowland between the Apuan Alps and the sea that the Romans called the Fosse Papiriane and that took almost two thousand years to drain, in phases, starting with the Medici in the 1600s and finishing after a catastrophic flood in 1996. Most of the coast doesn’t remember any of this. I can walk the Viareggio seafront and never once think of the word marsh. But in Torre del Lago, the drainage is still, somehow, provisional. I rolled down the window as we came into the town, and the air smelled different from it had five minutes back on the road. A faint mineral sweetness, half lake water and half rotting reed, that came and went depending on which way the breeze was running. The walls of the older buildings carried a mild green furring at the base, a bloom of mold the owners had given up repainting, because what would have been the point? Small rivers, or really canals, surfaced at the backs of houses and ran off between them as if they had just remembered they were supposed to be underground.

And then, a few minutes later, we came out onto the lake.

I parked the car at the belvedere in the middle of town and walked the last fifty meters to the water. The air changed again as I reached the railing, colder, more like stone. Lake Massaciuccoli lay in front of us, pale and almost still, and from where I was standing, I could see almost all of it at once, which is unusual for a lake. It covers seven square kilometers, and in most places it is three or four meters deep, a sheet of fresh water held in place by dunes and reed beds, rimmed by the largest stretch of Mediterranean wetland in Tuscany. Reeds leaned out from the near shore. Low wooden boats lay overturned on the grass beside the path. On the far side, a line of hills I could barely make out in the afternoon haze. A heron stood in the shallows fifteen meters from where I was and did not look up. The whole thing could have been a painting except for the bar behind me with its stereo playing, a scooter going past, and two men at a café table who were arguing about whether the espresso one of them had just been served was too cold.

Puccini had lived on this belvedere. His villa was across the inlet from where I was standing, a two-story Liberty-style building the color of diluted apricot, a wooden landing still out in front of it on the water where he used to hunt. He wrote most of Tosca in that house, and most of Madama Butterfly, and all of La Fanciulla del West, and in a letter I read later, he called the place, with the exaggeration of a man who meant it, “Torre del Lago, supreme delight, paradise, royal palace, 120 inhabitants, 12 houses.” When he died in Brussels in 192,4 his son had him brought back and buried in the chapel of the villa. The villa is a museum now. The lake stays the same.

We walked along the waterfront toward it. The whole front takes ten minutes if you don’t stop, and we stopped. I had an espresso at a café halfway along, and a cornetto whose edges had been sitting out slightly too long, and I watched a small wooden boat leave from the pontile with four people on it, headed out toward the reed beds on the far side where the herons live in a density that the biologists who monitor the place find astonishing. The reserve beyond the villa, the Oasi LIPU, runs unbroken for kilometers south toward Pisa, and is either one of the most important stopover points for migratory birds in Italy or just a very quiet place to walk for an hour, depending on who you ask. We didn’t go as far as the reserve that first day. The town held us.

Outside the reserve, on the other side of its boundary, the old Puccini arrangement still holds, and hunting goes on in a small but persistent way, which is why at Da Cecco, where we ate dinner later that same Sunday, the menu read like a meeting between two climates that shouldn’t really have been sharing a table. Seafood from the coast two kilometers away. Game from the marsh and the woods. I ordered pigeon, cooked with something dark and winey over soft polenta, and I can tell you it was one of the best things I have put in my mouth in this part of Italy. Sophia had the stoccafisso. The owner came past the table halfway through the meal and asked nothing about how the food was, because he already knew how the food was, and instead asked where we lived, and whether we had been here before, and when I said no, he said ma torna, allora, come back then, as if that were simply the obvious conclusion to draw. I have been back many times.

Between the belvedere and the dinner at Da Cecco, we did something we hadn’t planned to do. We went into a bar.

It was four in the afternoon, and we were looking for somewhere to sit for half an hour before deciding whether to drive home or stay. The place was called Bar Pagoda, a name that promises nothing and delivers on that promise, a cramped room with an espresso machine and a glass case of pastries going a little hard at the edges, a television in the corner showing a football match nobody was watching, three plastic tables on the pavement outside. We sat at one of the outside tables and ordered coffees and stayed longer than we had meant to, because within ten minutes of sitting down, I understood that we were watching something.

When you live in Italy long enough, you learn to read a bar the way a poker player reads a table. You can tell, almost immediately, whether a place has outsiders or doesn’t, who gets greeted by name, and who has to point at what he wants. In Forte dei Marmi in August, half the people in any bar are from somewhere else, and the Italian being spoken is being spoken in an accent from somewhere else, too. In Pietrasanta, most months of the year, the ratio is mixed. That afternoon at Bar Pagoda, Torre del Lago was not mixed. Everyone who came through the door knew everyone behind the bar, and the Italian in the room was the thick, swallowed Versilian that is sharp around the edges and takes an outsider months to hear properly.

The first wave was what I thought of at the time, and still think of, as the very local locals. Old men in short sleeves. Middle-aged women with shopping bags. A retired man whose conversation with the barista consisted almost entirely of complaints about the size of his cabbages this year, and whose concerns seemed genuinely and entirely to stop at the edge of his garden. I leaned over to Sophia and said they reminded me of the hobbits in the Shire, small kingdoms, careful about their vegetables, profoundly uninterested in the wider world, and I meant it as a compliment then, and I mean it as a compliment now. I have felt more at home in rooms of people like this than I have in almost any other kind of room in my life.

Around five, the second wave began to arrive. Men with long hair going grey at the edges, women in linen that had been washed too many times, one or two faces that looked like they had been at sea for a decade. The forever-artists, I started calling them in my head. The ones who came here in the seventies or the eighties and never quite left, or the children of the ones who did. Torre del Lago has been a bohemian town since Puccini turned his villa into a salotto for painters and musicians, and a hundred and twenty years later, the type was still walking through the door. Lorenzo Viani, the painter, drank in a bar not far from this one. Galileo Chini frescoed the villa across the water. Somebody at the next table was telling somebody else about a gallery opening in Lucca. Somebody at a table over was rolling a cigarette very slowly, the way you roll a cigarette when you have the entire evening ahead of you and no plans in it.

Around six, the third wave. Two men walking close together, then a group of four women, then a tall man in sunglasses who hugged the barista on the way in. By sunset, the bar was a mix of locals, lingering artists, and what a local magazine I picked up later described, with the particular bluntness of Italian journalism, as la comunità queer. I sat with my second Negroni and watched these three currents meet, and I slowly understood that what had at first looked like three unrelated populations was really one population. Not in the sense that everybody was the same. In the sense that everybody was, in their own way, here on purpose. Nobody ends up in Torre del Lago by accident. The road doesn’t pass through. You come in from Viareggio or from the autostrada, and either way, the road ends at the lake. There is no next town. There is the water, the reserve, the sea on the other side, and then the long empty coast running south toward Pisa with nothing on it but pines and dunes. This is the end of the line. The people who end up here over time are the people who want to be here, which turns out to be a very specific kind of person: the kind for whom the small, mildly musty, reed-smelling, mold-at-the-base-of-the-walls, hunting-and-opera, and now-also-rainbow-flag reality of this town is not a compromise but an answer.

The beaches are the same story told in a different register, which I only understood the second time we came down, a few weeks later, when we drove straight through the town and kept going west through the pine forest that separates the lake from the sea. The forest is dense and old, and the road through it passes campsites, and the occasional parked camper, and one stretch of viale where a handful of cyclists are always going somewhere, and then the pines open abruptly, and I was out at the coast.

The shipyards of Viareggio stood two kilometers to the north, a wall of cranes and hulls visible through the trees. To the east, the forest we had just come through. To the south, the reserve runs unbroken all the way down to the Serchio River at the edge of Pisa. Which meant the beaches here were geographically cornered. You cannot wander in. You cannot pass through on the way to something else. We parked in the sand lot at the end of the road, and I got out and walked up onto the sand, and what I was looking at was a strip of coastline that looked the way the whole Tyrrhenian must have looked a hundred years ago, before the bagno economy arrived with its color-coded umbrellas and its permanent wooden structures and its hierarchy of beach clubs by price point. Sand. Dune grass. Shade. A shower. A toilet. A makeshift bar. A few restaurants across the road, catering almost exclusively to the people who come to these beaches, which is to say almost exclusively to people who already know.

The northern stretch is the nudist beach. Further south is the gay beach. In between and around the edges, straight couples, families who had figured it out, old hippies with dogs, a retired German or two who had been tipped off decades ago by the right friend and had never left.

We had lunch that day at Adagio Sunset, a bar at the gay beach that tries harder than it needs to and is the better for the effort, with a menu of grilled fish and cold white wine and a crowd in its twenties, thirties, and forties that moved between the sand and the tables all afternoon without anybody being in a hurry. A man at the next table was reading a paperback in French. A woman at the table two over was braiding her friend’s hair. A waiter brought us a bottle of Vermentino without being asked to replace the first one, which we had drunk faster than I realized. After lunch, we walked next door to Mamamia, one of the older gay clubs in Italy and the center of gravity of queer summer in Tuscany since 1999, and it was two in the afternoon, and the club was already packed. Not packed the way a club is packed at two in the morning. Packed the way a good café is packed on a Sunday. People laughing too loudly at things that were not that funny, people taking their drinks out onto the sand, a drag performer in a bathrobe and sunglasses having an espresso at the bar, and arguing about something with one of the owners. Whatever else Mamamia is at two in the morning in August, in daylight, it is a living room. A living room that happens to have a dance floor and a set of speakers was tested for a much louder time of day.

The other beaches of Versilia don’t feel like this. I have spent an hour in August at a bagno in Forte dei Marmi, where a single umbrella costs more than most of the people at Adagio Sunset had spent on their entire day, and I was inside a stage set. The promenade of Viareggio is a promenade. The family beaches of Lido di Camaiore are for families. The lidos of Marina di Pietrasanta are built out to the last millimeter, all matching wooden decking and matching cushions, and a DJ starting up at four. These places have their virtue,s and I go to them too. None of them feels the way this strip of sand feels, which is the way a beach is supposed to feel when nobody is performing. No Germans in socks. No British tourist,s the color of a cooked prawn. Just a few hundred people, mostly Italian, mostly from within two hours, who liked each other and liked the place and had come here on purpose.

We drive back most often at dusk, and that first Sunday was no exception. The road out of town went east along the lake and then cut back through the pines. The water went pink, then grey, then a flat lunar silver. Somewhere out on it, a fisherman was pulling in a net, or a heron was standing in exactly the position it had been standing in when we arrived eight hours earlier. The villa at the waterfront was closed for the evening. The Gran Teatro, where every summer they stage Puccini’s operas with the lake itself as the backdrop, was dark. In July, the whole town would be full of people in linen jackets holding opera programs; that Sunday night, it was us and the mosquitoes and a bar on the corner where somebody had just put on a record.

Back toward Viareggio, the marinas took over again. The umbrellas, the lights, the long straight streets, everything the coast is supposed to look like. In the rearview, Torre del Lago was already out of sight behind the pines, which is exactly where it likes to be.