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. 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 cock…