The best coastal towns you can reach by train within 90 minutes of Pisa

Montignoso

Why visit Montignoso

Montignoso sits at 132 meters at the foot of the Apuan Alps, between Massa and Pietrasanta, in the corner where Massa-Carrara province meets Versilia. Inland, the hill village stands under the castle's rise; the coastal frazione lies well apart from it, opening onto the Versilia beach, so the commune is really two settlements, one on the slope and one on the sand, with the wetland reserve filling the plain between them.

The town declined through the sixteenth century because of coastal malaria, which explains the gap between the fortified hill and the later life of the shore: the two halves of Montignoso grew up in different centuries for the same reason, one retreating from the coast, the other only possible once that reason had passed. The thermal signal comes from a small spring on the Pasquilio side of the commune.

Read together, Montignoso is a place defined less by any single site than by the line running from mountain to marsh to sea, each part settled on its own schedule.

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What to see in Montignoso

• Castello Aghinolfi. The castle stands on an isolated rise above the village. What remains is the strongpoint that once taxed and watched the road below, not a ruin left to itself but a position, still legible as one.
• Lago di Porta. The reserve covers the coastal plain, flat water against the line of the Apuan Alps. The gate it is named for is gone; the wetland it left behind is not.
• Cinquale. Fine sand with the Apuan Alps rising directly behind it, a seafront quieter than its better-known neighbor and shaped by that comparison rather than by its own crowds.

How to get to Montignoso

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 52 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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Sarzana

Why visit Sarzana

Sarzana sits on the Magra plain at the Liguria-Tuscany border, eighty kilometers from Parma and thirteen from the sea at Portovenere. The town inherited the episcopal seat of Luni in 1204, when Pope Innocent III moved it here away from the malarial plain, and the cathedral built for that new seat still anchors the centro storico.

The walled center keeps its grid plan, with Via Mazzini and the cathedral square running through it and the Palazzo Roderio still doing duty as the town hall. Above the town, on a ridge, a second fortress with a triangular plan looks down on the plain and the older one below.

A future pope was born here in 1397. Between the hill fortress from the fourteenth century, the Renaissance rebuilding of the lower cittadella, and a cathedral that changed hands with a diocese, the town's layout reads as a record of who controlled the Magra plain and when.

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What to see in Sarzana

• Fortezza Firmafede. The fortress replaced a medieval cittadella on the same ground. Giuliano da Sangallo's plan survives largely intact, with the bulk and angles of the walls still readable from the approach into town.
• Cattedrale di Santa Maria Assunta. Late Gothic Tuscan cathedral, elevated to minor basilica in 1947. A cardinal born in the town, half-brother to a native-born pope, left his mark on the later additions.
• Croce di Mastro Guglielmo. The cross hangs inside the cathedral it has occupied since the seat moved here. Signed by its maker, it is the object the town's Romanesque reputation rests on.

How to get to Sarzana

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 54 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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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.

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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.

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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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