The second visit
Sunday Espresso II.
Buona domenica!
Family came in from Hungary last weekend. Not their first time in Italy, but their first time in Versilia, and so it began the way every first trip begins: in Pisa. Once they had the selfie, we picked them up and drove back to our home in Pietrasanta.
The timing was lucky. Tonfano, the slice of Marina di Pietrasanta where we live, runs its flower festival every first weekend of May, and this year it landed on top of International Workers’ Day and Mother’s Day. A normally quiet stretch of town filled up with people coming down from the Apuan Alps, from Milan, from Florence. There was even an antique market on the piazza.
Until that morning, our guests had been moving the way most first-timers do in Italy, especially Americans, who are by far the craziest about their itineraries: Florence, Venice, Rome, Como, Verona, Siena, plus a wine tour and a boat ride, all in seven days. Read any Reddit travel-planning thread, and you’ll find the same itinerary, laid out with absolute confidence, often saying “it’s a stretch, but doable", as if a holiday is some sort of competition.
Our guests, by Saturday afternoon, were sitting on the piazza in Tonfano, doing nothing on anybody’s list. Overused phrase, but kinda like dolce far niente. We walked and looked at flowers, roses, and lemon trees. We walked some more and looked at old furniture, old prints, and old silverware. When we weren’t walking, we were sitting at the bar with coffee, then a spritz, then a prosecco, and then we ate lunch for two hours at a trattoria. That was the day.
Yes, almost any town has a flower festival and an antique market. But I would argue that the antique stuff coming out of attics in Pietrasanta, a town where artists have lived for centuries, is not the same as the stuff at a garage sale in Phoenix. And a flower festival fifty meters from one of the best beaches in Italy has its own vibe.
None of which is really the point. The point is the art of doing nothing, and how foreign that art has become to the people who most need a holiday. We saw nothing on any “10 Things to Do in Tuscany” list. Visit Tuscany has no article about our weekend. Yet, our guests said it was their best day in Italy, ever.
You could do this at home, of course. We do, we’re at home, and we slowed into Italy on a daily basis now. But most people don’t, because there is always the next thing. There is always somethin’ to do. We get that. Lives are busy. Still, isn’t the whole point of taking a holiday to slow down? Most people I know who travel in Italy are doing the opposite, working through a list, going home with a hundred more selfies and more tired than when they arrived.
People who run through a country on their first visit always slow down on the second. And almost everyone says the second visit was better.
So why don’t we live our lives as if it were the second visit?
Alla prossima,
Peter
Pietrasanta, 10 May 2026
From our archives
We are still on a daily cadence, posting new articles every day on our site. This will slow down eventually, but we wanted to build up some history for you. We are going further and further from Versilia. Now, we have written a lot about the Apuan Alps.
Before Versilia, we lived in a small mountain-top village in the Lunigiana. This article tells that story:
We do road trips a lot, one of our best ones is in the mountains:
And we wrote about one of our favorite cities here, Lucca. If you are Italian, we know Lucca is not part of either the Lunigiana or the Apuan Alps. But to us, emotionally, it’s closer to the mountains than Pisa, so it belongs there, somehow. Maybe it’s because of the Serchio that flows through the entire Lunigiana through the mountains to the sea.
