The 8 best towns you can reach by train 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.

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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.

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Seravezza

Why visit Seravezza

Seravezza sits at 100 meters where the Vezza and Serra streams meet, in Versilia Storica, between the Apuan Alps and the Tyrrhenian. The territory was contested between Pisa, Lucca, Genoa and Florence for centuries before passing to the Medici, and the town's position at the junction of the two watercourses, with the mountains at its back and the coast within reach, explains why it mattered enough for all four to want it.

Michelangelo spent three years on Monte Altissimo behind the town, found his veins of white stone, and built a road to take it down toward the sea. Half a century later Cosimo I commissioned the Palazzo Mediceo here, a summer residence rather than a fortress, which says something about how settled Medici rule had become by the time it was built.

The two episodes, a papal quarry and a ducal villa, sit one above the other on the same small territory: the mountain supplied the stone that Florence wanted, and the valley below became a place worth building a palace in once the stone trade had made the route familiar.

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What to see in Seravezza

• Palazzo Mediceo. The residence stands in the centro, its design passed from one architect to the next as the project went on. It carries the UNESCO listing among the Medici Villas.
• Pieve di San Martino alla Cappella. Eleventh-century Romanesque parish church between Seravezza and Azzano, with the ruined Annunziata Oratory alongside.
• Monte Altissimo. The peak rises behind the town at 1,589 meters. The road Michelangelo built to bring the stone down still marks the route from quarry to valley, and the mountain is worked as a quarry to this day.

How to get to Seravezza

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 63 minutes away by road.

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Castelnuovo di Garfagnana

Why visit Castelnuovo di Garfagnana

Castelnuovo di Garfagnana is the historic capital of the Garfagnana, the deep mountain valley between the Apuane Alps and the Tuscan Apennine main ridge, 50 km north of Lucca along the Serchio river. The town sits where the Serchio meets the Turrite, and it anchors the valley both politically and economically: 5,600 residents, and the only real services, hospital, secondary schools, government offices, for the 30,000 people spread across the Garfagnana comuni around it.

The historic core is the fortress that now serves as the municipal museum, the building where the Este governor lived out his posting writing to friends about being stuck among bandits and chestnut-eaters even as he completed the final additions to his poem. Above the town, on the hill, stands the much larger Este fortress of 1579, built to control the trans-Apennine trade route and now a cultural centre and concert venue with the most photographed view of the Apuane peaks.

The two fortresses read together as a record of how the valley was held: one seat of government inside the town, one larger garrison commanding the pass above it. Castelnuovo is also the point of departure for the higher ground: the Apuane Regional Park, whose white-marble peaks are the same stone quarried at Carrara seen from the back, the Parco dell'Orecchiella further up, the show cave reached 45 minutes to the south, the Eremo di Calomini cliff-monastery, and over 200 km of marked Apennine trails.

The valley's food follows the same logic of scarcity turned to identity: alongside the farro and the chestnut dishes there is formentone otto file, a local maize cornbread, pecorino della Garfagnana, biroldo, a sweet-spiced blood sausage, and salt-cured prosciutto bazzone from the indigenous Garfagnana pig breed. A town built to govern a valley still does exactly that: the fortress on the hill and the one in the center were both instruments of control over a mountain pass, and the food still served in its bakeries and trattorie is what the same isolation once made necessary.

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What to see in Castelnuovo di Garfagnana

• Rocca Ariostesca. The fortress core of the town, now the municipal museum. Its rooms hold the record of the governor who complained about the posting even as he finished his poem here.
• Fortezza di Mont'Alfonso. Larger Este fortress on the hill above town (1579), built to control the trans-Apennine route. Now a cultural centre and concert venue with the great Apuane view.
• Farro della Garfagnana IGP + zuppa di farro. Terraced hillsides still grow the grain that shows up in every trattoria's soup bowl. Bags of it are sold at the Saturday market.

How to get to Castelnuovo di Garfagnana

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 84 minutes away by road.

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Barga

Why visit Barga

The town sits on the Colle Remeggio above the Serchio river, the Apennine ridge rising to the east as a counterpart to the Apuan Alps on the western side of the valley. The walled centro storico climbs the hill from Porta Reale, its stone houses narrowing as the streets rise toward the highest terrace, where the collegiate church stands.

The Colle di Caprona, a separate rise from the walled town itself, holds the house where Pascoli lived out his last years and the chapel where he is buried. The town also carries a Scottish thread: a wave of late nineteenth-century emigration sent generations of Barga families into the chip shop trade in Glasgow, and their descendants' festival now fills the streets every August with fish and chips rather than any dish more expected of the Tuscan hills.

A hill town built in stone around a Romanesque church, with a poet's house on one rise and a Glasgow-born sagra filling its streets each summer, holds more than its size would suggest.

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What to see in Barga

• Duomo di San Cristoforo. The church climbs from the eleventh century into the sixteenth, four red marble columns of the pulpit resting on stone lions. It occupies the highest terrace of the town, above the streets that lead up to it.
• Casa Museo Giovanni Pascoli. The house is preserved with its original furnishings and library, the chapel next door holding the poet's tomb.
• Centro storico. Walled medieval town climbing the hill, narrow streets of stone houses leading from Porta Reale up to the church on the highest terrace.

How to get to Barga

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 74 minutes away by road.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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