The Lunigiana | The Real Off the Beaten Path Italy

Notes from a borgo at four hundred meters

We chose it the way you choose a card from a deck. Sophia and I had spent half a year in Budapest by then, sitting with a death in the family, and we wanted to come back to Italy for the part of Italy that has nothing to do with anyone else’s idea of it. No Chianti. No Val d’Orcia. No Montepulciano, no San Gimignano, no Volterra, no stone farmhouse with a cypress driveway and a tasting menu on the lawn. We wanted a mountain, a small one, with a few houses on top and silence underneath. We pulled up the map, ignored everything we recognized, scrolled north until the roads thinned out and the names stopped meaning anything to us, and there, behind the marble of Carrara, in a fold of the Apuane I had never heard of, was a borgo called Marciaso. There was one Airbnb. The photographs showed a stone house with a terrace and a view of a valley. We booked it. We wanted to experience what it’s like to live in an end-of-the-world mountain-top Italian village anyway, this was the timing we hadn'…