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 pre…