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 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.
