Apuan Roadtrip | A Steak, a Friend, and the Long Way Down to Lucca
From Aulla to the Serchio valley, the inland road back
There are two ways to drive from Aulla to Lucca. The first is the one everyone takes. You drop down to the coast at Sarzana, you join the A12 and then the A11, you put the cruise control on, you spend ninety minutes looking at the same Tyrrhenian to your right, the same colored umbrellas in their colored rows along the same Versilia beaches, the same trucks from Genoa to Livorno passing you on the inside. You arrive in Lucca having seen Italy the way Italy is mostly seen, which is to say: through a windscreen at one hundred and twenty kilometers an hour, with the radio on. The second way is the one we took with Daniel, on a clear day in November, and it is two and a half to three hours longer if you stop, but it is in a different country.
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.
