The best beach towns within 90 minutes of Pisa
This is a coast built on sand and marble. The beaches north of Pisa are broad and shallow-shelving, backed by pinewoods and by the white scars of the Apuan Alps, which sit close enough to the water that you can look up from a beach umbrella and see quarries. The bathing water here carries the national clean-water award, and the season stretches from late spring, when the sea is still cold and the stabilimenti are repainting their cabins, through to September, when the crowds thin and the fried anchovies and the local fish soups taste better for the quiet. Inland the same towns keep marble workshops, cellars pouring Vermentino, and markets selling focaccia by weight.
But most people coming into Pisa airport turn north and keep going, to the Cinque Terre. Those five villages are spectacular and they know it: the trains are full from morning, the coastal path is metered, and the small harbours absorb more day visitors in a summer week than they have residents. It is a rational choice and a crowded one, and it means the coast in between is treated as a corridor rather than a destination.
The sand does not stop where the guidebooks lose interest. The same water, the same mountains, the same fish arrive along the Versilia and up into the Gulf of La Spezia, at towns with working ports, Saturday markets and beaches that fill with Italians rather than coaches. Fewer foreign travellers get off the train here, which is mostly a question of habit. These are the ones worth the detour, all of them within an easy run of Pisa.
Of the 23 communes we have mapped in within 90 minutes of Pisa, 6 qualify as beach towns: each holds the national award for clean bathing water. The smallest, Forte dei Marmi, has 6,861 residents.
Two more lists worth reading alongside this one: The best coastal towns that eat well within 90 minutes of Pisa and The best coastal towns within two hours of Parma.
Forte dei Marmi
Why visit Forte dei Marmi
Forte dei Marmi sits at sea level on the Versilia coast, 8.9 square kilometers of flat ground between the Apuan Alps and the Ligurian Sea. The town takes its name from a small fort built in 1788 under Grand Duke Leopold to defend the coast and used through the nineteenth century to stockpile marble shipped down from the Carrara and Seravezza quarries before loading onto ships at the wooden pier.
The Pontile, built between 1867 and 1877, carried tracks and a steam crane for the marble trade and is now the central promenade landmark. The town became a Belle Époque resort in the early twentieth century, then a luxury destination from the 1960s.
Russian buyers arrived in the 1990s, the press named the seafront Piccola Russia, and by 2023 around 99 bagni concessions operate along the beach, the most prestigious cabins renting at over 20,000 euros per season.
The beach here holds the national bathing award, which a comune has to win back every year on water quality, beach management and safety.
What to see in Forte dei Marmi
- Fortino di Leopoldo. The 1788 marble-loading fortress that gave the town its name, on the central piazza, now housing the Museo della Satira e della Caricatura.
- Pontile. Wooden marble-loading pier built between 1867 and 1877, with tracks and a steam crane, now the central seafront promenade.
- Spiaggia di Forte dei Marmi. Wide Versilia Bandiera Blu beach with around 99 bagni concessions running back to the Belle Époque, fine golden sand and the Apuan Alps as backdrop.
How to get to Forte dei Marmi
There is no station we could confirm here, so this one means driving. Pisa is roughly 38 minutes away by road.
Our tip
May through September is the resort season. June and September give the cleanest weather and the calmest beach. July and August fill the bagni to capacity, the seafront restaurants book a month ahead, the Wednesday market gets dense, and the parking on Viale Morin disappears by ten.
Lerici
Why visit Lerici
The Gulf of La Spezia takes its eastern shore here, and English Romantics renamed that shore the Bay of Poets after Byron and Shelley made it their address in the early 19th century. The fortress that defines the harbour was begun by the Pisans in 1152 to control the gulf, captured by the Genoese in 1256, and rebuilt in its present pentagonal form through the 14th and 15th centuries; it now holds a paleontology museum with Jurassic dinosaur tracks recovered from the local sandstone.
Shelley lived at a house in nearby San Terenzo in 1822, he drowned that summer sailing from Livorno, and Byron swam across the bay from Portovenere on his way to visit him. Beyond the historic harbour the commune stretches south past a colourful frazione perched on a rocky promontory above the sea, a member of the Borghi più belli d'Italia network in its own right; a coastal trail links the two through olive terraces and pine woods.
The town beach holds a Bandiera Blu and the harbour fills with sailing dinghies all summer. Upper fortress and lower water, working harbour and outlying fishing hamlet: the whole gulf edge here reads as one address that two poets happened to share, and the parts of the commune as its castle, its beach, and its outpost on the rocks.
The beach here holds the national bathing award, which a comune has to win back every year on water quality, beach management and safety.
What to see in Lerici
- Castello di Lerici. Begun by the Pisans in 1152, captured by Genoa in 1256, rebuilt in its present form in the 14th-15th centuries. The pentagonal walls still hold the harbour under them, and the paleontology museum inside keeps the Jurassic tracks pulled from the local sandstone.
- Bay of Poets / Casa Magni. The Casa Magni at San Terenzo, a Lerici frazione, was Shelley's residence in 1822, the year he drowned in the bay. The house still stands on the shore that gave the Bay of Poets its name.
- Tellaro. Pastel-coloured fishing frazione clinging to a rocky promontory at the southern edge of the bay. Linked to Lerici by the coastal Castelnuovo trail.
How to get to Lerici
There is no station we could confirm here, so this one means driving. Pisa is roughly 61 minutes away by road.
Our tip
April through October is the open season in the Bay of Poets — warm coastal days, calm seas from late spring, and the sailing fleet active all summer. June and September are the best months: warm sea, longer light, fewer crowds than July-August. The castle is open year-round (paleontology museum included) and Tellaro is best in October-November when the colours go warm.
Pietrasanta
Why visit Pietrasanta
Pietrasanta sits at 14 meters at the foot of the Apuan Alps, two kilometers from the Tyrrhenian, close enough to the quarries behind it and the coast in front of it that stone and sea both shape the town. It was founded in 1255 by Luca Guiscardo da Pietrasanta on the older fortress that already stood on the hill, and it grew through the fifteenth century into the processing center for marble cut from the mountains at its back.
The centro storico, where the studi and foundries still work, sits inland; the beachfront with its pinewood park lies on the coast, a separate register of the same town, one built for stone and one for summer. Michelangelo arrived in the early 1500s to work the local stone, and Henry Moore, Joan Miró and Damien Hirst followed in the twentieth century, drawn by the same studios and foundries that cut marble for the Duomo's façade centuries earlier.
The Mariani foundry on the outskirts now casts work for sculptors who order remotely from New York and Beijing. What began as a quarry town for one church has become a place where the working of stone, not the display of it, is the thing on view.
The beach here holds the national bathing award, which a comune has to win back every year on water quality, beach management and safety.
What to see in Pietrasanta
- Duomo di San Martino. White-marble façade on the collegiate church, first documented in 1223 and enlarged in 1330 and 1387. It faces the square that still functions as the town's civic center.
- Piazza Duomo. Main square with the Marzocco column celebrating Florence's 1513 reacquisition and a statue of Grand Duke Leopold by Vincenzo Santini.
- Museo dei Bozzetti. Civic museum holding 700 plaster models and clay sketches from sculptors who have worked in the local studios since the 1960s, a record of process rather than finished work.
How to get to Pietrasanta
There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Pisa is roughly 41 minutes away by road.
Our tip
May through September brings the Versilia season: Marina di Pietrasanta fills, the Versiliana festival programs concerts and theatre in the pinewood from late June, and the centro storico restaurants spread tables across Piazza Duomo. June and September are the calmer brackets. July and August push the beach to capacity and the inland piazza into evening-only rhythm.
Camaiore
Why visit Camaiore
Camaiore stretches from the Apuan Alps to the Versilia coastline, the only Versilia commune with substantial territory in both. The town center sits at 34 meters on the alluvial plain, named Campus Maior by the Romans for a military encampment on the road from Lucca to Luni.
That name and that road explain the town's shape: a fixed inland center built around the Collegiata and the medieval grid, connected by the Via Francigena to a coast six kilometers away that the Romans never had reason to build toward. The inland town and the beach at Lido di Camaiore function as two settlements under one name, joined by the road rather than by contiguous streets, with the Apuan Alps visible from the shore as the backdrop to both.
A commune this shape, mountain territory, a Roman road town, and a beach at the end of it, holds together not because its parts resemble each other but because each has stayed distinct while remaining reachable from the others.
The beach here holds the national bathing award, which a comune has to win back every year on water quality, beach management and safety.
What to see in Camaiore
- Collegiata di Santa Maria Assunta. Thirteenth-century parish church with a fourteenth-century bell tower, the central religious building of the inland town.
- Badia di San Pietro. The church stands alone now, a single Romanesque nave where a monastery once stood, its stone unadorned in the way that marks the Lombard-era Benedictine houses of the region.
- Lido di Camaiore. Fine sand six kilometers from the town center, with the Apuan Alps rising directly behind it, mountain and shoreline visible in the same view.
How to get to Camaiore
There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Pisa is roughly 44 minutes away by road.
✷ We have written about Camaiore
“I watched eight old men stand up at once, and something in me quietly rearranged itself. They had been sitting at Caffè Celero on Piazza San Bernardino for most of an hour, maybe longer, doing what men over sixty do on an Italian piazza, which is nothing, but nothing done carefully and particularly.”
Read our piece on Camaiore →I Could Get Old Here
Our tip
May through September runs the Versilia season at the Lido and gives the inland town its share of light evenings. June and September are the quieter brackets: warm enough for the sea, cool enough to walk the Francigena stages without losing the morning. July and August fill the Lido with families from Lucca and Milan, parking gets tight, and the inland piazze stay calmer than the seafront.
Carrara
Why visit Carrara
Carrara sits at 80 meters in the narrow plain where the Apuan Alps drop to the Tyrrhenian. The 650-plus marble quarries in the three valleys above the town, Torano, Fantiscritti and Colonnata, have produced more marble than any other place on earth, worked since Roman times.
The white and blue-grey stone went into the Pantheon and Trajan's Column. Michelangelo first came in 1497 to find marble for his Pietà and kept returning until he opened his own quarry in the Polvaccio above Torano, still called Cava di Michelangelo.
The Duomo di Sant'Andrea, begun in the eleventh century, was the first medieval church built entirely of the local stone, with a bichrome marble façade. The city's Accademia di Belle Arti has trained sculptors since 1769 and the surrounding studi still work commissions for sculptors who never set foot in Italy.
The beach here holds the national bathing award, which a comune has to win back every year on water quality, beach management and safety.
What to see in Carrara
- Duomo di Sant'Andrea. Eleventh-century cathedral, the first medieval church built entirely of Apuan marble, with a Romanesque-Gothic bichrome façade finished in the fourteenth century.
- Cave di Marmo. Over 650 quarry sites in the Torano, Fantiscritti and Colonnata valleys, worked since Roman times and visible on cave tours from the town.
- Piazza Alberica. Sixteenth-century square built by Alberico I Cybo Malaspina inside the expanded city walls, ringed by marble façades and a central statue of Maria Beatrice d'Este.
How to get to Carrara
There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Pisa is roughly 55 minutes away by road.
✷ We have written about Carrara
“The road that goes up to Colonnata ends at Colonnata, and you understand this only when you arrive, because the village sits on a shelf of the mountain that the road was built to reach, and there is nowhere else for the road to go. I had driven up from the coast on a Tuesday in late spring with the windows open. I had come up to eat fat.”
Read our piece on Carrara →Colonnata, Carrara, and the Marble Mines | The White Mountain And The Fat
Our tip
May through September is when the cave tours run reliably and the seafront frazione of Marina di Carrara fills with families from Lombardia and Emilia. June is the best month for the quarries: long light, stable weather, and the white-on-white-on-grey of the cuts is visible at the Fantiscritti viewpoint without the August haze. July and August add heat and tour buses, particularly at Colonnata where the lardo cellars stay cool.
Viareggio
Why visit Viareggio
Viareggio sits at sea level on the Versilia coastal plain, the largest commune on the Tuscan riviera. The first parade ran in 1873, organized by middle-class residents as a float procession down the seafront; the masked protest against tax policy that followed gave the event its character.
The mascot's colour scheme, red and white, was taken from the beach umbrellas that line the shore, a detail that ties the Carnival's invented figure back to the town's own beach culture rather than to any outside tradition. The rail link to Lucca and Florence arrived in 1890, and the city turned into a Belle Époque resort in response: the seafront was rebuilt in the ornamented style of that era over the following decades.
The Magazzini Duilio 48 along Viale Margherita, together with the promenade's other survivors, mark out where that resort-era rebuilding is still legible today. The city's two identities sit side by side on the same stretch of shore: one built by a rail-borne resort economy, the other by a homegrown winter festival that turned into the town's defining export.
The beach here holds the national bathing award, which a comune has to win back every year on water quality, beach management and safety.
What to see in Viareggio
- Passeggiata Liberty. Three-kilometer Belle Époque seafront promenade lined with Stile Liberty villas, cafés and bath houses built between 1890 and 1925.
- Cittadella del Carnevale. Sixteen vast hangars where the papier-mâché floats are built year-round, with the Museo del Carnevale and the float-construction workshops open to visitors.
- Spiaggia di Viareggio. Ten-kilometer Bandiera Blu beach lined with the original bagni concessions of the Belle Époque, fine sand and shallow seabed.
How to get to Viareggio
There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Pisa is roughly 29 minutes away by road.
✷ We have written about Viareggio
“The bike lane starts at the bottom of Lido di Camaiore and runs south along the coast for about eight kilometers before it hits the pier at Viareggio, and the thing it teaches you, if you ride it often enough, is that Viareggio is a city you should almost always see from the saddle of a bicycle and never, if you can help it, from the pavement. The pavement has the crowd on it. The bike lane has the city.”
Read our piece on Viareggio →Viareggio | The cat at the end of the road
Our tip
May through September runs the season. June and September are calmer than the July-August peak when the beach concessions sell out and the parking on Lungomare fills by ten. February brings Carnival weekends and the largest crowds of the year for the parades along Viale Manin and Viale Margherita; the floats run through a full Sunday route.
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