Guide | The Apuan Alps
The Mountains Behind Versilia
I have written in another guide about Versilia, the coast where I live, which I believe is the best part of Italy to base yourself in. This guide is about what is behind it. If you stand on the beach at Marina di Pietrasanta and turn your back to the sea, what you see is a wall of mountains rising sharp out of the plain, white-streaked with marble in summer and white-streaked with snow in winter, with stone villages perched at every cuttable spur. That wall is the Apuan Alps. And behind it, in the valleys that the Apuane shelter and the Apennines close off to the north, are two of the least visited regions in Tuscany: the Lunigiana and the Garfagnana.
I am going to call all of this the Apuan Alps in this guide, even though a geographer would not. The Apuane proper are the marble mountains themselves, a narrow range about fifty kilometers long and twenty wide, separated from the main Apennine spine by the Serchio valley. The Garfagnana is the valley east of the Apuane. The Lunigiana is the valley north. The Pistoiese Apennines, where Abetone sits, are further east again. None of these are the same thing, technically. But for a traveler based in Versilia and pointing the car inland, they are one country. The road from Carrara to Castelnuovo to Abetone is two and a half hours and passes through all of them, and the food, the stone, the silence, and the chestnut woods are continuous from one end to the other. So I will call it the Apuan Alps, because that is the spine, and the rest is what the spine holds.
The case for going up there is the inverse of the case for staying on the coast. Versilia is connected, infrastructured, prosperous, and Italian in the working sense. The mountains are disconnected, partially neglected, often poor, and Italian in the older sense. The villages were built before tourism existed, the food was made for the people who farmed there, and most of what you see has not yet been laid over with the Instagram filter that has flattened so much of the rest of Tuscany. The Chianti hills are beautiful and full of buses. The Val d’Orcia is beautiful and full of buses. The Apuan Alps are beautiful and have no buses, because the roads will not take buses, and the villages have nothing for a bus to disgorge people in front of. This is the entire reason to go.
I will tell you frankly what you are signing up for. The roads are narrow and patched, the rain comes hard, the signage is in Italian only, the restaurants are usually closed when you want them open, and the village you drove an hour to see may have one bar that opens on weekends and a locked church. The hospitality, when it appears, is the real kind — unperformed, unsold, and offered without ceremony. The food is the food the village eats. The light at six in the evening turns the stone a particular Apennine pink that you will recognize for the rest of your life. And nobody is taking your picture for you, because there is nothing here that photographs.
Spend two days up there, and you will understand, more clearly than from any coast town, why we live in this corner of Italy.
Why the Mountains
Two valleys and a spine. The Apuan Alps are the marble mountains immediately behind Versilia. The Lunigiana is the valley to their north, the Garfagnana to their east. For a traveler, all three are one country.
An hour from the coast, in geographical terms. Three hundred years away, in every other sense. Stone houses, chestnut woods, villages of eighty people, most of whom are over eighty.
This is what the famous Tuscan hills were before someone wrote about them. Same stone, same castles, same pink hour. No ceramic Pinocchios. No menus in three languages.
Food that wasn’t built to be sold to you. Testaroli and panigacci cooked between hot terracotta discs, biroldo blood salami, lardo cured in marble basins, chestnut flour, and wild boar that tastes like the woods.
The trade-off: the roads are bad, and the restaurants close when you want them open. This is a region for people who can handle a region. If you need everything to work, stay on the coast. If you can drive a narrow road in the rain and eat what is on the day’s menu, come up.
Where to base yourself
If you do want to sleep up here, base in Barga.
Barga sits on a hill above the Serchio in the heart of the Garfagnana. Half its families emigrated to Glasgow in the nineteenth century and came back with money, habits, and a dialect bent toward Scots, and the result is a Garfagnana hill town with a working opera house, a couple of small hotels with English-speaking owners, and a food culture that bends in directions you do not find anywhere else in Tuscany. If you want one or two nights in the mountains and to feel like a town rather than a hamlet, this is the one.
If you are just road-tripping here, the city of marble and art is the best place to stay: Pietrasanta.
The places not to miss
The marble spine
Carrara, Colonnata, and the marble mines. The white wall behind Versilia has worked since the Romans, and it still works today. From the coast, you see it as a backdrop. From inside it, you see what the backdrop costs. The quarries are immense open wounds in the mountain, the trucks come down all day, and the men who work them eat their lunch in the same village halfway up where the lardo is cured. Colonnata is that village. The basins are marble. The pork fat ages in them for six months with salt, rosemary, and garlic, and what comes out is the single most concentrated thing you can eat on a piece of warm bread. The mines themselves are stunning and unsettling in equal measure, and a half day spent driving up to them, eating lardo in Colonnata at lunch, and coming back down by late afternoon is one of the great half days in Tuscany. The Feature covers Carrara as a city, Colonnata as a village, and the mines as a working landscape.
The Lunigiana — Italy’s least-written-about corner
Marciaso and the Lunigiana. The valley north of the Apuane, behind Carrara, where the Malaspina ruled for five centuries, and where almost nobody goes now. Marciaso is the eighty-person borgo where we lived for two months. The Lunigiana Feature is the closest thing this publication has to a thesis statement on why we write about the places we do.
Equi Terme. A thermal village at the bottom of a gorge in the Apuane, where the chestnut flour comes from the woods around it, and the panzerotti come stacked with stracchino and prosciutto. La Posta is the trattoria I keep going back to.
Biroldo and sopressata. The dark blood salami of the Garfagnana and the sopressata of the Lunigiana — the foods these mountains made before they made anything else.
The Garfagnana
Castelnuovo di Garfagnana. The capital of the valley. The Rocca Ariostesca, where Ariosto did three reluctant years as governor while finishing the Orlando Furioso. The town that has more life in it on a Tuesday evening than most Tuscan villages have on a Saturday. Covered in detail in the Apuan Roadtrip Feature, which threads it together with the bridges of the Serchio valley.
Barga. The town of Garfagnana has a Scottish accent because half its families emigrated to Glasgow in the nineteenth century and came back with their dialect bent. One of the strangest and most particular towns in Tuscany.
Bagni di Lucca and the bridges. The old thermal town where Byron and Shelley came, now mostly quiet, and below it the Ponte delle Catene at Fornoli, the Italian first cousin of the Budapest Chain Bridge. Further down the Serchio is the Ponte della Maddalena, the Devil’s Bridge. The Apuan Roadtrip Feature threads all three together.
Worth the extra hour east — the Pistoiese Apennines
Abetone. Not technically the Apuane — it sits on the Apennine spine an hour and a half further east, on the border with Modena. But the principle is the same: a mountain village built for one season, empty in the other, and the empty season is the better one. Our Feature is about Abetone in August, when the lifts are still, and the air is 20 degrees cooler than on the coast.
The food only here
Testaroli and panigacci. Flat discs of pasta cooked between hot terracotta plates, a Lunigiana technology older than dried pasta. Eaten with pesto on the Ligurian side, with lardo and stracchino on the Tuscan side.
Lardo di Colonnata. Cured pork fat aged in marble basins, served on warm bread. Mentioned in every guide because it deserves to be.
Biroldo. The dark blood salami of the Garfagnana. Acquired taste. Worth acquiring.
Where to eat
La Posta, Equi Terme. Mountain trattoria in a stone gorge, full of locals on a Tuesday in October, panzerotti stacked with stracchino and prosciutto. The room San Gimignano used to be.
Ristorante Ulisse. Covered in its own dispatch. The best place to experience a tasting menu dedicated only to porcini mushrooms, which are also popular in this region.
More restaurants are coming as the archive grows. This section will be updated regularly.
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My final note
The mountains behind Versilia are not for everyone. They reward the traveler who can handle a closed shutter on a Tuesday, a road that isn’t on the GPS, a menu only in Italian, and a village that doesn’t try to be anything for you. If that’s not the kind of travel you want, stay on the coast. The coast is honestly fine.
But if you want to see what Tuscany was before Tuscany became a brand — the same stone, the same castles, the same pink hour at six, only without the layer of gloss laid over the famous places — drive an hour inland from any beach in Versilia. The country becomes itself again. You only have to commit to the road in.
This guide is alive. I update it whenever a new piece on the Apuan Alps, the Lunigiana, or the Garfagnana goes up.
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.
Guide last updated: 14 May 2026
