Abetone & Tuscan Alps | A Ski Village in August

Abetone, when everyone else is on the beach

The chairlift was not moving. Of course, it was not moving. It was the middle of August, and the temperature at the bottom of the lift, where I was standing with a coffee in a paper cup, was twenty-three degrees, and the slope above me was green from end to end, the grass long, a few yellow wildflowers in patches where the snow would later be. The cabins of the lift hung there in the still air at intervals, swaying slightly, empty. There were two crows on one of the cables. There was no one in the parking lot. There was no one in the small wooden hut at the bottom of the lift, which had a sign in the window saying it would reopen in November. There was, somewhere up the road, the sound of a single car shifting down through gears, and then it stopped, and there was nothing.

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…