Pietrasanta | Old Money, Long Afternoons

The capital of Versilia. Where art is the lifestyle.

The first town we lived in was up in the mountains, a hundred people above a curve in the road, a church, a grocer who opened for four hours a day twice a week and closed if it rained, and for the first few weeks we had all of it, the stone houses and the old men on the benches and the kind of silence you read about in books, and the wanting and the having lined up the way they almost never do. The town was called Marciaso, up in the Apuan Alps, and by the second month, we had understood what we didn’t know when we moved in, which is that silence is a skill most of us don’t have, and that a thirty-minute drive for bread stops being a charming detail the fourth time you make it in the dark. Reality is a big killer of romanticism.

So we looked at the map. Pietrasanta sat twenty kilometers down, where the Apuan Alps stop and the sea starts, the town was said to be full of galleries, my wife is a designer, and I had always cared about art without ever doing anything useful about it. That w…