The 6 best towns with a serious restaurant in the province of Lucca

Montecarlo

Why visit Montecarlo

Montecarlo sits at 163 meters on an isolated hill above the Lucca plain, looking south toward the Valdinievole. Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV founded it in 1333 after liberating Lucca from Pisan rule, on a site previously called Vivinaia for the wine roads that crossed the hill.

The name Monte di Carlo, Charles's mountain, has held since. The walled centro storico is still ringed by its fourteenth-century defensive walls, with the Fortezza del Cerruglio rising above the highest point.

Wine production has been documented here since Roman times; the first tavern keepers selling Trebbiano in barrels appear in records in 1371. The Montecarlo DOC was established in 1969, the white blends Trebbiano with French varieties including Sémillon and Pinot Gris, and roughly twenty wineries operate within the commune, a notable density for a population under 4,500.

Antico Ristorante Forassiepi, Locanda Agricola Posapiano, Forassiepi have been named by a guide.

What to see in Montecarlo

• Fortezza del Cerruglio. Fourteenth-century fortress on the highest point of the hill, expanded by Castruccio Castracani and the Florentines in the fifteenth century.
• Centro storico. Walled medieval village founded by Charles IV in 1333, still inside its original defensive perimeter along Via Roma.
• Teatro dei Rassicurati. Small eighteenth-century theatre with 95 seats and a horseshoe plan, inaugurated in 1795 and still used for the autumn season.

How to get to Montecarlo

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Prato is roughly 38 minutes away by road.

Everything we know about Montecarlo

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.

La Magnolia, Sciabola, Bistrot and 4 more have been named by a guide.

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.

Everything we know about Forte dei Marmi

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.

Alex, La Martinatica, Filippo and 6 more have been named by a guide.

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.

Everything we know about Pietrasanta

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.

Il Merlo, Quinto Quarto, La Dogana and 1 more have been named by a guide.

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.

Everything we know about Camaiore

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.

Il Piccolo Principe, Lunasia, Romano and 9 more have been named by a guide.

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.

Everything we know about Viareggio

Lucca

Why visit Lucca

Lucca sits at 19 meters on the Serchio plain, a Roman colony from 180 BC laid out in a grid still visible in the centro storico. The current walls run four kilometers around the city, twelve meters high and thirty meters wide, built between 1513 and 1645 and never breached.

They are now a tree-lined elevated promenade circling the old city, and one of the only complete Renaissance city walls left in Italy. The Piazza dell'Anfiteatro preserves the elliptical footprint of a second-century Roman amphitheater that once held ten thousand spectators; the ring of houses follows the arena's exact shape.

The Cattedrale di San Martino holds the Volto Santo crucifix and Jacopo della Quercia's tomb of Ilaria del Carretto. Giacomo Puccini was born here in 1858.

The town gets the Lucca Comics & Games festival every October-November, the largest comics convention in Europe at 300,000 attendees.

Antica Locanda di Sesto, Nida, All'Olivo and 8 more have been named by a guide.

What to see in Lucca

• Mura di Lucca. Four kilometers of intact sixteenth-century walls, 12 meters high and 30 meters wide, built 1513-1645, now an elevated tree-lined promenade.
• Piazza dell'Anfiteatro. Elliptical square preserving the footprint of a second-century Roman amphitheater that once seated ten thousand.
• Cattedrale di San Martino. Eleventh-century cathedral with a Romanesque-Gothic façade, the Volto Santo crucifix and Jacopo della Quercia's tomb of Ilaria del Carretto from 1406.

How to get to Lucca

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 34 minutes away by road.

Everything we know about Lucca