Forte dei Marmi | The Rich Town You Can't Fly To
On bikes, through the villa grid of Forte dei Marmi
It takes ten minutes on the bike, door to door, and in those ten minutes the town you are riding through turns into a different country. We leave from ours, which is the kind of street where the houses are three or four stars if they are hotels at all, and the villinos are the size that a dentist from Milan might have built in 1978, and the cafés out front have the ordinary business of selling coffee to ordinary people. We cross one road, then another, and at some point I never quite clock the moment it happens, the scale shifts. The villas double in size. The hedges get taller and then tall enough that you can’t see over them, although in Forte the etiquette is mostly still to leave the front open to the street, because the point of a house like that is partly that you want it to be seen. The road is paved better than the road behind us was paved. A man in his late seventies is walking a small dog past a Prada shop. A woman thirty years younger than him is walking a step behind, in a cocktail dress, at three in the afternoon, and there is no party.
We keep pedaling. This is the move.
The first time I did this ride I thought I understood what Forte dei Marmi was by the time I reached Piazza Garibaldi, and I was wrong. You have to do it a few times before you start to see the thing underneath. The thing underneath is that this is not Portofino, it is not Capri, it is not Porto Cervo or San Remo, and every comparison people reach for when they try to describe it to somebody who hasn’t been is misleading in a specific way. All of those places got rich off something visible: a natural harbor, a cliff, a view, a port for large boats. Portofino is a postcard you pay to enter. Forte dei Marmi has a small harbor, a handful of five-star hotels that are mostly palazzos converted room by room, no cliffs, no vista, and an airport that is further from it than Naples is from Capri.
You cannot really fly here. There is nothing dramatic to photograph from the air. And yet everyone with serious money in northern Italy owns, or has rented, or is waiting for their friend to leave so they can rent, a villa here. The Agnellis have a villa. The industrial families of Turin and Milan built their summers around this grid of streets. Thomas Mann came. Aldous Huxley came. Henry Moore came. Luchino Visconti came. The Capannina di Franceschi, a short walk from where we are now pedaling, has been operating as a beach-club-nightclub-restaurant since 1929 and is the oldest continuously operating one in the world, and it has been the social coordinate of Italian summer for almost a century (note: bought by Giorgio Armani in 2025, sadly he died weeks later, now it is closed for renovation). None of this is a secret. It is simply not legible from the outside.
We turn into the back streets of Roma Imperiale and the villas get serious. This is the reason to come on a bike. A car cannot do this. A car has to stay on the main roads and has to park somewhere, and the whole pleasure of Forte is moving slowly past houses you are not going to enter. On a bike you can drift. You can stop in front of one because the line of the roof is unusual and you want to look at it for another thirty seconds. You can take the next turn at random because there is no reason not to. Some of the villas were designed by the architects whose names you would recognize if you cared about twentieth-century Italian architecture, Gio Ponti, Michelucci, Pagano. Most of the ones you pass are just the work of good local architects doing the job well for clients who did not intend to live in the house more than six weeks a year. Almost none of them are lived in permanently. This is a town of ten-bedroom mansions whose point is a holiday. I think about this a lot on these rides. The idea of building a ten-bedroom mansion so that you can be in it for six weeks is the kind of thing that does not feel entirely possible until you ride a bike past thirty of them in an afternoon.
We end up, as we always end up, at the Fortino, which is the small eighteenth-century fortress at the center of Piazza Garibaldi and which has given the town its name. Forte dei Marmi means the fort of the marbles, and it is called that because before this place was a summer resort for anybody it was a shipping yard for the marble quarried out of the Apuan Alps above us, the same mountains that gave Carrara its white walls and gave Pietrasanta its sculptors’ workshops. The fort was a customs post and a warehouse. The pier down the road was there to load marble onto ships. The town itself, as a town, did not exist. It was a warehouse with a fort next to it. The first villas came because a few rich families in the 1800s decided the sea air was good for them. The second wave came because those families had friends. The third wave came because those friends’ children discovered the Capannina. Everything after that is a story about people who already have money choosing to spend August in a place that other people with money have already chosen.
We lock the bikes against a rail on the piazza, though I always wonder why we bother. Nobody is stealing a bicycle in Forte dei Marmi. The risk calculation does not pencil out for anyone who has wandered into this part of town. Caffè Roma is on the corner and it is where we always go, because it sits at the angle of the piazza that gives you the whole square at once, the fort on your left and the shops running away to the right and the slow promenade of people between them. We order coffee, and the waiter does not hurry, and we settle in.
This is where the thinking happens.
You watch, for an hour, and you start to sort the crowd. There is the thin seam of Italians who actually live in Forte year-round, who are mostly old, who know each other, who nod. There are the summer Italians, who come down for a week or a month and who dress extravagantly but in a way that is not trying to prove anything to you. There are the French from Monaco who drive up with license plates that say so, and they are quiet and well-groomed and a little bored.
And there are the Russians. I should say this plainly. You can pick them out from two hundred meters. They are louder than anybody else on the piazza. They dress expensively and badly at the same time, which is a difficult thing to do and requires real commitment. They drive the enormous black SUVs that are parked two wheels up on the curb at the top of the pedestrian zone, the ones that no Italian would ever drive to a piazza this small. The age-gap couples, the silver-haired man and the woman in the cocktail dress at three in the afternoon, those are almost always Russian, and almost always the man is silent and the woman is the one who speaks, and when she does it is not in Italian. I did not know, before I lived near here, that there are around five hundred Russian and Ukrainian families who live in or rent villas in Forte. I did not know that in 2008 Roman Abramovich anchored a yacht offshore and couldn’t get a dinner reservation, and that the story of that snub is what put the town on the Russian map in the first place. I noticed the people before I knew any of this, and now that I know it, it makes sense of what I was noticing. In March, when no Italian comes here to vacation, the Russian voices are the main voices on the street, because the Russians are the ones who actually live here twelve months a year. In July, when the Italians arrive, the Russian voices don’t disappear, they just get folded into the general sound. You can hear them if you listen. I am not going to be diplomatic about this. They are the rudest and most conspicuous part of the town, and the town has arranged itself around their money, and every boutique in the old center now stocks for a wallet that does not check its balance after buying a Rolex. But there is a reason why “normal” Italians usually don’t come here, only maybe by bike, like us.
The weekly antique market, which sets up every week on Piazza Dante, a few streets over from where we are drinking coffee, is where I feel this most clearly. It is not a flea market. It is an open-air interior-design showroom for people furnishing third houses. Gilt chairs from Piedmont, Murano chandeliers, a nineteenth-century writing desk, a pair of framed architectural drawings, a set of Florentine candlesticks that an old family is quietly dismantling and selling. We never buy anything. We walk through the way you walk through a small museum, resting our eyes on objects that have survived four or five owners and will survive four or five more. You can do this for an hour and then walk back to the piazza for another coffee, and it costs you nothing. The galleries, on the other hand, are mostly loud and modern and not to our taste, because a lot of the money that commissions contemporary art in this part of the world has no taste. This is not a theory. You walk in, you look, you walk out. Everybody is polite. Nobody minds.
The cookies arrive. The light on Piazza Garibaldi in the late afternoon is a specific yellow that the walls of the Fortino hold for about an hour before it tips into evening. A woman at the next table is explaining something to a younger man, in Italian, gently, and he is nodding. A child is chasing a pigeon. The waiter reappears and clears the empty cup without being asked. I think, as I always think when we are sitting here, that I like having this town ten minutes from my house, and I also think that I would never want to live inside it, and these two facts do not contradict each other. The town is a place to visit the way you visit a very expensive shop you cannot afford and do not need to enter. You walk the aisles, you admire the things, you leave. You ride your bike back through the scaling-down of the houses, the hedges shrinking, the cafés going back to the prices of cafés, and by the time you are home the ordinary world has resumed, and that is exactly the pleasure of it.
There is a sign somewhere in town, I have never been able to find it again, that I think said something about the fort being built in 1788 to defend the coast against pirates. I like that the word pirates was ever a serious concern for this place. I think about it sometimes when I pass an SUV with a Monaco plate.
