Magra Delta Roadtrip | A Tagine, a Lighthouse, and a Dead Roman City
The loop we drove on a busy May Saturday when Lerici was full, and have been driving ever since
There are two ways to leave Versilia when you live here: the flat country, the umbrella beaches, and the smell of the marsh that this whole coast was built on top of begins to press you down. The first is north-east, into the mountains, the road that climbs up the inland valleys toward the Lunigiana and the Garfagnana, and we have written about that one already. The second is north-west along the coast, twenty minutes up the highway, get off at Sarzana, and circle the headland that pushes itself into the sea between the Magra river and the Gulf of La Spezia. The first way ends in chestnut woods. The second way ends back in saltwater, but a different saltwater from the one that left you tired in the first place.
We took the second trip on a Saturday in May for the first time, soon after we had moved to Pietrasanta. The plan had been to drive up and find out what Lerici was. The plan lasted about ten minutes after we arrived, because Lerici on a Saturday in May, even before the high season really begins, is already full, and after circling the harbor twice and looking once into a paid lot that was already at capacity, we gave up and kept driving back south. The drive that followed, by accident, became the loop we have repeated several times since, in every season, when we want to leave Versilia for half a day and come back to it remembering why we live here.
The whole circle is small. You could throw a stone across it. It is contained within a regional park called the Montemarcello-Magra-Vara, named for two of the rivers within it and for a small hilltop village on the headland that curves around the road. It runs from Tellaro, on the cliff above the eastern side of the Gulf, up onto the Caprione promontory, down to the mouth of the Magra at Bocca di Magra, inland to Sarzana, and back to the highway. The whole thing is about fifty kilometers without traffic and just over an hour of driving.
There is a thing to know about this part of Italy before you drive it, because the whole loop is organized around a city that no longer exists. Or, it kinda does… Anyways, obviously the Romans founded Luni in 177 BCE on what was, at the time, the eastern bank of the Magra mouth and is now about a kilometer inland, the river having moved in the centuries since. They founded it as the port for the marble they were cutting out of the Apuane behind us, the marble we now call Carrara marble but the Romans called lunense, Luni marble, for the city that shipped it. By the third century, Luni was a city of fifty thousand people, with a forum, two big bath complexes, an amphitheater for seven thousand, and patrician houses with mosaic floors and frescoed walls. A fourth-century earthquake brought half the temples down. The port silted up over the centuries that followed, the river kept moving, malaria came into the marshes, and in 860 a Saracen raid was so devastating that the city never came back. The bishop kept his seat there, in increasing degrees of pretend, until 1204, when he gave up and moved a few kilometers inland to Sarzana. The city was looted for its marble for the next six hundred years to build everything around it. Dante mentioned its ruin in the Paradiso. The whole region is called Lunigiana, the land of Luni, for a city you cannot find on a modern road map. Well, you can, but that’s different. We will come to it. It matters to everything else.
Tellaro is what you do when you cannot park in Lerici. It is the cliff village three kilometers south, the last small settlement before the rocks turn south and the road begins to climb inland, and it is the casual Ligurian village where you arrive at the top and walk down. You park in a paid lot at the cliff edge and you take the road that drops in steep switchbacks into the houses below. The slope is not friendly. It is something close to forty-five degrees on the steepest stretches, the streets are narrow enough that the walls press on both shoulders, the steps are old and uneven, and twenty minutes of going down means twenty serious minutes of going back up in the heat. You should know this before you begin.
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At the bottom is a small harbor with a stone breakwater, a lighthouse on the rocks, and a clutch of pastel fishermen’s houses that the sea reaches in storms. No castle. No fortress. No museum, no commercial restoration, no story to tell except the one about the octopus, which I will get to. The houses press themselves against the cliff in the way Cinque Terre houses do, the pinks and oranges and yellows and that one yellow-green that is only ever painted on a Ligurian fishermen’s house. In a storm, the waves reach the first floors. We have seen the photographs. We have never been there during the storm.
This is, structurally, a Cinque Terre village. Same architecture, same colors, same fishing-village footprint, same cliff. The only thing it does not have is the part of the Cinque Terre that other people will tell you not to skip: the people. On our first Saturday in May, we had Tellaro almost to ourselves. I do not know why this is. Tellaro is on every list of the Borghi più belli d’Italia, it has its own fully spread Wikipedia entry in multiple languages, and it is twenty minutes by car from a town that is full on the same afternoon. But Tellaro is not full. The four times we have been on a busy weekend, it has never been full. The bars in the harbor were maybe a quarter taken. The restaurants had tables free. The only thing happening on our first visit was a small group of children kicking a ball against the back of the church wall, and the dog watching them. From November till April, the place is literally empty.
The single story Tellaro carries is the one about the octopus. In July of 1660, Saracen pirates tried to sack the village in the middle of a stormy night. The sentry posted in the bell tower of the church of San Giorgio had concluded, reasonably, that no pirate would put to sea in this weather, and had gone to sleep. The pirates landed anyway. The bell began to ring. The Tellaresi woke, the village armed itself, the pirates were beaten back to their boats. The village then discovered that the sentry had slept through the whole thing, and that the bell had been rung by a large octopus, which had climbed the tower and wrapped its tentacles around the rope. The octopus has been the symbol of the village ever since. There is even an annual local festival dedicated to it (every second Sunday in August). There are wrought-iron octopuses on doorknockers, ceramic octopuses in the windows, and a sliced grilled octopus on the menu of the small restaurant at the harbor, called La Barca. La Barca is what you go to Tellaro for: a table on the rocks at the edge of the water, a plate of the small fried sea-things.
You climb back up to the parking lot. You get in the car. The road continues south along the cliff, the sea on your right, and then it bends inland into the woods, and the trees close over you and you forget the sea entirely for fifteen minutes of switchbacks through holm oak and pine. The road is the SP28, and it climbs the spine of the Caprione promontory, which is the headland that separates the Gulf of La Spezia from the mouth of the Magra. The first time we drove this, after the failed parking in Lerici and the discovery of Tellaro, we were not sure where we were going. We had a vague idea that the road continued. It continued. It brought us, after about twenty minutes, to a small village called Montemarcello, which we had never heard of and which sits 266 meters above sea level on a flat hilltop with views in three directions.
I will say this about Montemarcello, and then I will defend it. It has the best panorama in Liguria, full stop, and I do not think it is close. The reasons are two. The first is the obvious one. You are 266 meters up, the cliff is high enough that there is no rocky beach below to draw a crowd, the sea on one side is the Gulf of La Spezia with Portovenere across the water and the Cinque Terre fading north, and the view on the other side is the Magra running into its delta with the white Apuane behind it and Tuscany beyond. The second reason is the one I care about more. There is almost never anyone there. I am not exaggerating. We have been many times, in winter, in fall, in summer, and we have always been able to find a parking space and sit in the small square without queuing for a coffee. The town is on the Borghi più belli d’Italia list. It is the namesake of the national park. None of this seems to have made it busy. I have no explanation for this.
The town itself is a Roman castrum. The streets are the only intact Roman street grid in the whole Magra valley, a perpendicular layout drawn by the engineers who came up here in the second century BCE to fortify the headland after the consul Marcus Claudius Marcellus had defeated the local Ligurians in 155. Mons Marcelli, Marcello’s hill. The town was named for the man who killed the people who had lived here before. There is a fifteenth-century gate, a small parish church, perhaps eight or nine streets in the grid, and one real square, named for the day in December 1944 when an American bomb killed the wrong people in the wrong house.
There is one place in the square where we go when we go to Montemarcello, which is more or less every time. It is called Il Bistrot delle Ragazze, the Girls’ Bistro, and it is run by what we believe is one extended family, all women, all originally from somewhere in North Africa (my bet: Morocco), who cook Ligurian food with a faint inflection that does not belong to Liguria. The pesto is Ligurian. The focaccia is Ligurian. The vegetables on the side of the focaccia are Ligurian. But they use a slightly more spice. And it is slightly more heated. And they have tagine, which is definitely not Ligurian. We have spent whole afternoons here. The square holds maybe four outdoor tables, the bistro another six inside, and the late lunch you started by one runs until four because nothing happens that asks you to leave. The Girls’ Bistro is what travel writing is supposed to find.
From Montemarcello you keep going on the SP28, which begins to descend, switchbacks down through the Caprione forest, and lands you in Bocca di Magra. We make this small detour every time. Bocca di Magra is a small marina town at the river mouth, a quay along the water with maybe twenty fishing boats and twenty pleasure boats and the same number of bars and gelaterias, and a promenade that runs four hundred meters until the river meets the sea. There is not much here. We sit, we have a coffee, we look at the boats, we walk to the end of the promenade and look at the Magra finishing itself into the gulf, and we walk back. The whole stop takes forty-five minutes. The reason to do it is that you have just driven through forest for an hour and the body wants water again. Both Montemarcello and Bocca di Magra belong to the same commune, Ameglia, which is the working town up the hill in between them and which I will not write about because we have never stopped there long enough to write about it honestly.
From Bocca di Magra you drive ten kilometers inland to Sarzana, which is where you eat dinner.
Sarzana is the city that took the bishop’s seat from Luni in 1204. It is the city the bishops moved to when the old Roman city had become too marshy and too saracened and too dead to be a city anymore, and it is therefore the city in which everything Luni had been continues, in attenuated form, eight hundred years on. The cathedral keeps the relic of the Holy Blood that the bishop carried with him when he left Luni. The fortress on the hill above the town, the Sarzanello, was built by the Bishop-Counts and then rebuilt by Castruccio Castracani of Lucca, who has appeared in every other piece we have written about this part of Italy and who turns up any time you cannot find someone more obvious to blame. There is another fortress inside the town, the Firmafede, which Lorenzo de’ Medici ordered rebuilt in its current form in 1487 after Florence had taken Sarzana, and which Florence then promptly lost again. Sarzana spent the medieval centuries being held by the bishops, then Lucca, then Pisa, then the Visconti, then Florence, then Genoa, then France, then Sardinia, then Italy.
What Sarzana kept, through all of this passing of hands, is an old town that looks like nothing else in Liguria. It looks like a small Lucca. The streets are flat and parallel, the central Piazza Giacomo Matteotti is grand and rectangular and Tuscan, the cathedral facade is Pisan, the eighteenth-century palaces on the main streets have been kept in good repair, and the food in the restaurants on the side streets is half Ligurian and half Tuscan, and not the messy ambivalent thing border food usually is. Pesto is on the menu and so is pappa al pomodoro. There is focaccia and there is pici. The people who live here describe themselves as proudly Tuscan despite the fact that they are administratively Ligurian, and the moment you meet one of them you understand that they are, in fact, Tuscan in the way that matters, which is in the food, the cadence of speech, and the willingness to argue.
We eat in Sarzana at a place called Simon Boccanegra, which is the strongest single dinner a Ligurian kitchen can put in front of you without breaking out into a Michelin star. They take the focaccia and treat it as a dish. They take pesto and treat it as if it were a sauce on a Michelin plate. They are, as Italians do, simultaneously serious about the food and not serious about themselves. The whole thing is a small hotel above the restaurant, run by the same family. Before we eat, we sometimes drive five minutes up to the Sarzanello fortress on the separate hill above the town, which you reach by a brief, steep climb (drive, please), and from the top of the keep you see the whole Magra valley spread out beneath you. The Apuane to the south are still white at the tops in late spring. The river is a brown line running between green plains. The houses of the towns on the other slope are visible, one of them being Castelnuovo Magra, which I will come to in a moment. The fortress itself is, as a fortress, not very interesting unless military architecture is something you enjoy. The point is the view.
That is the loop. From Sarzana you take the A12 south for fifteen minutes and you are home, in Versilia, which now feels like a flat sandbar after the height and the woods and the river mouth. The first time we did this drive, we got home after dark. Sophia said her legs hurt from Tellaro, and we agreed to do it again. We have done it again. We have done it many times, in many seasons, with the same itinerary, the same restaurants, and the same long, late lunch in the square at Montemarcello. The drive is the destination. The story is not the towns; the story is the loop.
Over the years, we have added or substituted stops. Two are worth telling.
The first is Castelnuovo Magra. Castelnuovo is a hill town on the eastern slope of the Magra valley, visible from Sarzanello, and built around a now-ruined castle that the Bishop of Luni erected in the late twelfth century to defend against the Malaspina marquises. It is one of the better-preserved old hilltop towns in the whole valley. It has the things a good Italian hill town has: one main street paved in sandstone, a few palaces from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a parish church with a Brueghel inside that has been stolen and recovered enough times to be a small local epic, a tall remnant tower from the bishop’s fortress at the far end. Dante stayed at the castle, by the way. On the sixth of October 1306, he was here as the legal procurator for the Malaspina, negotiating and signing the peace treaty between the Malaspina and the Bishop of Luni inside the great tower. The local history is now largely organized around this one Dante day. One of the rooms in the tower has been turned into a Dante study. The Dante story, like the octopus story, is in this case true.
The reason to go is not Dante. The reason to go is a steakhouse called Bisteccheria Napoli e Pepe on the main street, which serves the kind of large, simple, wood-fired meat dinner you want after a long walk in a hill town and a long drive home. The walls have hams on them. The chairs are wooden. The wine is local, mostly the Vermentino these slopes produce in volume, the Colli di Luni DOC, which is one of the better white wines in Liguria and the one that Castelnuovo bothered to build a small wine museum for. The steaks are large and raw, like it should be. The drive from Sarzana is fifteen minutes uphill and then back down again. It does not really belong inside the day if you have done the full loop. It belongs as a substitute for Sarzana dinner if you are doing it on a different day, or as a separate evening if you have one to give.
The second is Luni itself, which we said we would come back to.
Luni is what remains of the city that gave the region its name. The first time we went, we expected a small site. It is not a small site. The Romans built large. The amphitheater is mostly intact, the forum is laid out and walkable, two of the great patrician houses have been partly reconstructed with their mosaic floors and their painted walls preserved, the foundations of the Capitoline temple are still where they were, the museum at the center has gathered the smaller finds. The whole park covers about thirty hectares. It’s mostly an open-air museum. It’s also free to visit, except for the amphitheater, which is like 5 EUR. The amphitheater is what you go for, by the way. It is just outside the Roman walls, on what was the eastern suburb of the city, along the old line of the Via Aurelia. You walk into it through one of the original arched entries, and you are alone. I mean that literally. We have been three times. The most other visitors we have seen in the place is six. Oh, and you can walk freely anywhere, no gates, no restricted areas. Which is a bit weird, because most of Luni is still an active archaeological site. The reason for the silence is that Luni does not exist on most tourist maps. It is not on the route. It is on the SS1 between Sarzana and Carrara, but you pass it without seeing it unless you have decided to come.
The whole modern commune is named after the dead city, in a small administrative reversal that I find I enjoy. Until recently, the modern village near the ruins was called Ortonovo, and Luni was a frazione of Ortonovo, and the ruins were inside Luni-the-frazione. The commune voted to rename itself, and Ortonovo became a frazione of Luni. The names have flipped. You can still go to Ortonovo, a small hilltop village visible from the ruins on the eastern slope, with views back across the Magra plain. From the amphitheater it looks pretty.
There is a thing to say about a road like this one, and I have said it before about another one of our roads, the inland one toward Aulla, but it is true twice. The Magra valley and the Caprione headland do not lead anywhere you cannot also reach by some other way. The Cinque Terre is famous. Lerici is on every coastal-Italy list and has been since the English Romantics drowned themselves here. Carrara is forty minutes away and is on every cruise itinerary. What sits between these places, in the small park behind the gulf, is what tourist Italy left over when it organized itself around the photogenic. A village where an octopus rang the bells. A hilltop town named for a Roman consul that the consul’s descendants never got around to making famous. A Tuscan city operating quietly in Liguria. A bishop’s palace where Dante did his diplomacy on the way to writing the Paradiso. A vanished Roman city whose name still organizes the food, the wine, the dialect, and the bureaucracy of an entire region.
The whole circle takes a day, if you do not stop anywhere for long. We have never done it in a day. The first time, on the Saturday in May, we drove home in the dark. We have done it many times since.
