Torre del Lago | The town at the end of the road

Where Puccini came to hunt and everyone else came to be left alone

We learned about Torre del Lago from the Paspartú magazine, which I’d picked up in a café in Pietrasanta, the way you pick up a magazine when you’re new somewhere and still trying to figure out where you’ve landed, and the article that summer was about Puccini, because it was the centenary of his death and everyone along this coast was publishing something about him. We had seen his birthplace in Lucca already, a narrow yellow house on a narrow street with a plaque on it, and we had filed him away the way I had filed away most composers in Italy, as a name attached to a city. What I didn’t know, and what the magazine told me, sitting over a coffee that was going cold in front of me, was that he had spent the latter part of his life in a town I had never heard of, twenty minutes south of where we lived, on a lake I had never seen. It was our first year in Versilia. We were still learning what we lived inside of.

I went home and looked at the map. Viareggio, then south along the coast to…