Viareggio | The cat at the end of the road

Where the sea makes people work for a living

The bike lane starts at the bottom of Lido di Camaiore and runs south along the coast for about eight kilometers before it hits the pier at Viareggio, and the thing it teaches you, if you ride it often enough, is that Viareggio is a city you should almost always see from the saddle of a bicycle and never, if you can help it, from the pavement. The pavement has the crowd on it. The bike lane has the city.

I ride down most weekends when the weather allows it, and I mean the whole year, not just the summer. In August, I’m usually gone. We leave Italy for England for that month because the country where we actually live becomes, for four weeks, a country we no longer recognize.

The supermarkets fill up, the parking spaces disappear, you go to pick up bread and end up behind three foreign families arguing about sunscreen at the till. Most of the rest of the year, the Versilia is the opposite of this. Pietrasanta in February belongs to its people. The coast is almost empty. Even the restaura…