The best hidden coastal towns that eat well in Toscana
Tuscany's coast is longer and stranger than its reputation suggests: umbrella pine forests behind the dunes, salt lagoons full of mullet and eels, walled hill villages that look down at the water from a few kilometres inland, and stone and stucco houses the colour of dried terracotta. The eating follows the geography. Cacciucco and grey mullet roe near the lagoons, wild boar and chestnut flour in the coastal hills, raw red prawns and anchovies at the fish counters, and behind almost every stretch of shoreline a wine road running through Bolgheri and Val di Cornia. Late spring and September are the best of it, when the sea is warm, the crowds have thinned and the kitchens are cooking for locals again.
Most people arrive on this coast with one plan, which is Tuscany itself: Florence, Siena, the Val d'Orcia, then a few days at the beach on the way out. The result is that the famous stretches take the whole load. Viareggio's seafront fills solid from June, its restaurants turn tables at speed, and the beach clubs run wall to wall with barely a metre of free sand between them. It is a good town with a real Carnival, but in August it is working at capacity and the cooking shows it.
The same water, the same pine woods and the same producers carry on north and south of the busy middle. Head down towards the Maremma and the lagoon towns, or up into the marble foothills where the coast road meets the mountains, and you find places with a fraction of the summer traffic and a kitchen that a dining guide has picked out by name. Each town below sits directly on the sea, and each has at least one table worth the drive.
These are the smaller names, and they eat well.
Of the 84 communes we have mapped in Toscana, 17 qualify as coastal towns that eat well: each sits directly on the sea, and a dining guide has named a table in each. This list is the hidden ones, 9 in all, ordered smallest first. The smallest, Montescudaio, has 2,144 residents.
Elsewhere in the catalogue: The best hidden coastal towns you can reach by train in Toscana and The best coastal towns within two hours of Siena.
Montescudaio
Why visit Montescudaio
Montescudaio sits fifteen kilometers inland from the Tyrrhenian coast, on a hill above the valley the Cecina river cuts toward the sea. Fewer than 2,200 people live in the commune, and most of them are outside the centro storico, which is left as a tight knot of stone houses ringed by its old walls: a single church, the clock tower, and the terrace where the vines drop downhill toward the Val di Cecina and the water beyond.
The town carries four institutional signals at once, an unusual density for its size: a registered wine appellation, a bread-network membership rare in this part of Tuscany, a name that predates the medieval walls, and the walls themselves built around an eleventh-century abbey. Wine and bread are both grown and baked around the same hilltop that once needed fortifying.
The fortress, the loaf, and the vineyard are not three separate stories here but three uses of the same ground, worked over centuries after the shields it was named for stopped being necessary.
SaQua - Ristorante in Collina have been named by a guide.
What to see in Montescudaio
- Centro storico. Walled medieval village, a tight ring of stone houses on the hilltop, built around the abbey that gave the settlement its first walls and structure.
- Torre Civica. Clock tower at the entrance to the borgo, the tallest visible structure and former civic landmark of the fortified village.
- Chiesa di Santa Maria Assunta. Eleventh-century parish church on the site of the medieval abbey, the anchor around which the walled village took shape.
How to get to Montescudaio
There is no station we could confirm here, so this one means driving. Livorno is roughly 44 minutes away by road.
Our tip
May through September is the season on the Cecina hills: dry days, vine work, harvest from late August through September. The coast lies fifteen kilometers west and the sea breeze keeps evening temperatures lower than the inland Maremma. July and August bring crowds to the beaches at Cecina and Marina di Bibbona, but the borgo on the hill stays quieter.
Bibbona
Why visit Bibbona
Bibbona sits at 85 meters in the Val di Cecina, in the southern province of Livorno, eight kilometers from the sea. The town has Etruscan origins, attested by a small bronze goat statuette, now in the Florence archaeological museum, that became the town symbol.
After medieval struggles between Pisa and Florence, the territory passed to the Gherardesca counts, who controlled most of the Etruscan Coast. Monk-knights, probably French and probably Templar, operated from the pieve in the medieval period, a detail that survives more clearly in local memory than in stone.
The village keeps its hill position while its coastal frazione does the work of meeting the sea: the fort once handled customs, sanitary inspection and defense, the beach now holds a national recognition, and the reserve in the inland hills once supplied the wood that moved through that same coastline. Upper town, shore and forest were never separate economies so much as three faces of one strip of land running from the Val di Cecina down to the sea.
La Pineta, Taverna La Carabaccia, Io Cucino have been named by a guide.
What to see in Bibbona
- Pieve di Sant'Ilario. The church stands on Piazza XX Settembre. The right side and facade keep their Romanesque lines, while the added left nave throws the plan out of square, a visible seam between two building campaigns three centuries apart.
- Borgo medievale. Concentric ring of stone streets and stairways around the old castle, with surviving medieval gates and the central piazza.
- Forte di Marina di Bibbona. Built for customs control, sanitary inspection and defense against corsairs, the fort held a working coastline job, not a decorative one, watching the same shore the beach now occupies.
How to get to Bibbona
There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Livorno is roughly 51 minutes away by road.
Our tip
May and June bring warm water and quiet beaches, before the July and August crowds reach the Costa degli Etruschi. The borgo at 85 meters stays five degrees cooler than the coast and is the place to sleep in high summer. July and August are full: Marina di Bibbona fills, the pine-shaded beach fronts get crowded, and the Forte sees long queues at sunset.
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.
Il Pozzo di Bugia have been named by a guide.
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.
Our tip
May through September is the working Versilia season, the inland equivalent of the coastal months at Forte dei Marmi and Pietrasanta six kilometers away. June and September are the best moments to walk up to the Cappella and Azzano: the mountain trails open, the marble quarries above visible from below. July and August are hot in the lower town but cool on the slopes, and the Apuan rains hold off until late September.
Capalbio
Why visit Capalbio
Capalbio stands twelve kilometers from the Tyrrhenian coast, the last hill town before the border with Lazio. Charlemagne gave the land to the Abbey of Tre Fontane in 805; the Aldobrandeschi held it through the medieval period, the Orsini built the castle, and Cosimo I de' Medici took it in 1555.
It became an independent commune in 1960. The medieval walls and the fortress define the centro storico at the top of the hill; the surrounding territory drops from the wooded uplands of Monte Calmata down to the coastal reserve at Lago di Burano.
The sculpture park sits four kilometers south of the walls, apart from the old town rather than within it. A borgo that governed itself late, held by abbey, feudal lords and Medici in turn before its own commune, and a territory that runs in one line from hilltop stone to coastal wetland.
Agriturismo Antica Pinciana, Il Frantoio, La Dogana by Enoteca la Torre and 1 more have been named by a guide.
What to see in Capalbio
- Rocca Aldobrandesca. Medieval fortress at the top of the borgo, later expanded by the Orsini, with a square tower and battlements that overlook the Maremma.
- Mura medievali. Two concentric circles of walls enclosing the centro storico, with a walkable parapet that opens onto views toward the Argentario.
- Giardino dei Tarocchi. Sculpture park four kilometers south of the borgo, its ceramic and mirrored figures set among holm oaks.
How to get to Capalbio
There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Roma is roughly 108 minutes away by road.
✷ We have written about Capalbio
“Everyone driving from Florence down to Rome crosses the Maremma without noticing, because there is nothing on that stretch to make them slow down. The hills give out. The cypresses stop. What opens up instead is flat open country, wheat and grass running off to a few low rises, the least Tuscan-looking part of Tuscany, a landscape you would call dull if you were being honest and which most guidebooks solve by leaving out.”
Read our piece on Capalbio →Maremma | The Last Cowboys of Tuscany
Our tip
May through September is the season the borgo and its territory work together: the centro storico stays cool at 217 meters while the Tyrrhenian coast at Chiarone-Capalbio fills with swimmers. The Giardino dei Tarocchi runs April through October. July and August are hot inland; afternoon hours in the borgo thin out and the coast takes over.
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.
✷ We have written about Forte dei Marmi
“It takes ten minutes on the bike, door to door, and in those ten minutes the town you are riding through turns into a different country. We cross one road, then another, and at some point, I never quite clock the moment it happens, the scale shifts. The villas double in size. The hedges get taller and then tall enough that you can't see over them.”
Read our piece on Forte dei Marmi →Forte dei Marmi | The Rich Town You Can't Fly To
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.
Castiglione della Pescaia
Why visit Castiglione della Pescaia
Castiglione della Pescaia sits at sea level on the Maremma coast, north of Grosseto, with a medieval upper town rising on the promontory above the harbor. The site was Roman Salebrone, before that Etruscan and Umbrian, settled because of the lake behind it that the Romans called Portus Traianus.
The lake silted up over time; what remains of it is the wetland reserve southeast of town, a Ramsar site since 1991. The upper town and the harbor below it read as two halves of one settlement: the fortress watching the water from above, the working port beneath, and behind both the flat reclaimed ground where the lake used to be.
Inland and to the east, the hills hold the remains of one of the major Etruscan cities, apart from the coastal life below. North of town, the pine forest gave Calvino his summers and now holds his grave on the hill above the harbor.
The place is built in layers: a silted lake turned nature reserve, a watchtower turned fortress, an Etruscan hill city, and a modern coastline still shaped by all of it.
La Trattoria Enrico Bartolini, Osteria del Mare già il Votapentole, Clann and 1 more have been named by a guide.
What to see in Castiglione della Pescaia
- Rocca Aragonese. Castle on the promontory above the harbor, 10th-century watchtower core enlarged by Alfonso of Aragon in the 15th century, modified by Cosimo I and the Lorraine.
- Riserva Naturale Diaccia Botrona. Wetland reserve southeast of town with bird-watching hides, pink flamingos and white herons in season.
- Casa Rossa Ximenes. Hydraulic structure built by Jesuit engineer Leonardo Ximenes for the Lorraine drainage works; now multimedia museum of the wetland reserve.
How to get to Castiglione della Pescaia
There is no station we could confirm here, so this one means driving. Livorno is roughly 113 minutes away by road.
Our tip
May and June bring warm sea and quiet beaches, before the high-summer crowds arrive from Rome and Florence. June through September holds the Bandiera Blu and the Diaccia Botrona stays accessible in the cooler hours. July and August push the coast above thirty; Punta Ala and the harbor fill, and the Rocca above the old town becomes a sunset destination. Palio Marinaro di Castiglione della Pescaia falls in August.
Castagneto Carducci
Why visit Castagneto Carducci
Castagneto Carducci sits at 194 meters on a hill above the Costa degli Etruschi, sixty kilometers south of Livorno. The town was called Castagneto until 1907, when it was renamed for the poet Giosuè Carducci, who spent part of his childhood here and made the surrounding landscape the subject of Davanti a San Guido.
The Castello della Gherardesca, the Lombard-origin fortress of the counts who held the land for nine centuries, still anchors the centro storico. Below the hill, on a coastal plain that locals call the Maremma livornese, sits the frazione of Bolgheri.
In 1944, Mario Incisa della Rocchetta planted Cabernet Sauvignon on his estate there; the resulting wine, Sassicaia, started the category that journalists in the 1970s named Supertuscan. Bolgheri DOC was created in 1983 and Bolgheri Sassicaia DOC in 1994, a sub-zone for a single estate.
The cypress avenue from the coast road up to Bolgheri, two parallel rows planted in 1832, is the one Carducci put in the poem.
Osteria Magona, Osteria Enoteca San Guido, Osteria Ancestrale - Arduino Bolgheri and 1 more have been named by a guide.
What to see in Castagneto Carducci
- Castello della Gherardesca. Lombard-origin fortress at the top of the borgo, held by the Della Gherardesca counts for nine centuries, still in private family use.
- Viale dei Cipressi. Five-kilometer cypress avenue between the SS1 Aurelia and the frazione of Bolgheri, planted in 1832 and immortalized by Carducci.
- Bolgheri. Coastal-plain frazione at 88 meters, walled medieval village turned wine capital, home of Sassicaia, Ornellaia and the Bolgheri DOC.
How to get to Castagneto Carducci
There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Livorno is roughly 55 minutes away by road.
✷ We have written about Castagneto Carducci
“You reach Bolgheri up a straight avenue of cypresses, five kilometers of them standing in two close files like a colonnade with the roof taken off, and the road does the thing it was planted centuries ago to do, which is tell you before you get there that you are arriving somewhere that thinks a great deal of itself. The comune the village belongs to carries its name.”
Read our piece on Castagneto Carducci →Bolgheri | The Story of an Amaro
Our tip
May through September is the season the comune fills, the coast at Marina di Castagneto holds Bandiera Blu, and the Bolgheri cellars run their tastings on appointment. The Bolgheri DiVino wine festival runs in mid-August. July and August push afternoon temperatures past thirty and the cypress avenue stops being walkable in midday sun.
Monte Argentario
Why visit Monte Argentario
Monte Argentario is a peninsula on the southern Tuscan coast, 35 kilometers south of Grosseto, connected to the mainland by three sand spits that enclose the lagoons of Orbetello. The mountain at its center rises to 635 meters, and the two seats of the comune sit at sea level on opposite sides of it, the northern harbor facing toward Grosseto, the southern one turned toward the open coast below.
The history of the peninsula splits from the rest of Tuscany after 1557, when the territory was carved out of Sienese land and handed to the Spanish crown, which spent the next century and a half fortifying the coastline against corsair raids rather than building the kind of inland towns found elsewhere in the region. The result is a place organized around its edges rather than a center: two ports facing different waters, a mountain of forts between them, and a coastal road that ties the whole shape together for anyone crossing from one harbor to the other.
What the peninsula adds up to is a piece of Tuscany that spent its formative centuries as a Spanish military frontier, and still wears that history in its two-harbor shape and the ring of stone above them.
Il Pellicano, Alicina sul porto, Ristorante Dama Dama and 1 more have been named by a guide.
What to see in Monte Argentario
- Forte Stella. Six-pointed star fort above Porto Ercole, designed for the Spanish by Buontalenti and Camerini and completed in the mid-1600s as part of the Presidi defense system.
- Forte Filippo. Spanish bastioned fortress above Porto Ercole, named for Philip II and built in the late 16th century to protect the Stato dei Presidi from corsair raids.
- Rocca Aldobrandesca, Porto Ercole. Earlier Aldobrandeschi fortress incorporated into the Spanish defense system, dominating the harbor and the old town of Porto Ercole.
How to get to Monte Argentario
There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Roma is roughly 137 minutes away by road.
Our tip
May through September is the season on the peninsula. Porto Santo Stefano and Porto Ercole fill in July and August; the Palio Marinaro on August 15 doubles the population of Porto Santo Stefano for a single afternoon. June and September are the easiest months, with warm water and fewer day-trippers. Palio Marinaro dell'Argentario falls in August.
Orbetello
Why visit Orbetello
The isthmus runs out into the lagoon and splits it into two basins, Ponente and Levante. Two sand tombolos close the shape from either side: Giannella to the north, Feniglia to the south, both reaching toward the Monte Argentario promontory and meeting it at either end.
The Etruscans settled the site first, the Romans followed with their colony of Cosa nearby, and centuries later the Spanish took the isthmus as the seat of their coastal enclave, leaving the Governor's Palace on the main square where it still stands. Of the nine Sienese windmills once built out in the water, one remains in place, the only Italian water-and-wind mill of its type still fixed where it was built.
The lagoon that once carried Balbo's flying boats out toward Rio and Chicago now carries a WWF reserve and the nets of a bottarga and eel cooperative working the same waters since 1965. A town built on the water it is named for, held between two arms of sand and one mountain it never quite touches.
L'Oste Dispensa, Osteria Bolle have been named by a guide.
What to see in Orbetello
- Duomo di Santa Maria Assunta. Fourteenth-century cathedral with a Gothic travertine façade, rebuilt over an earlier Etruscan-Roman temple foundation.
- Fortificazioni Spagnole. The bastions and the Polveriera Guzman magazine, still standing along the edges of the historic center.
- Laguna di Orbetello. The brackish water splits into two basins and is now a WWF reserve and Ramsar wetland.
How to get to Orbetello
There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Roma is roughly 124 minutes away by road.
Our tip
May through September is when the lagoon and the Feniglia and Giannella beaches do their work. June brings the migratory bird count back up: flamingos, herons, avocets. July and August push temperatures over thirty degrees and the tombolos fill with Roman day-trippers, so the lagoon path on the Ponente side stays the quieter option. Sagra del Pesce di Albinia falls in the season.
More from Anywhere Italy
- The best hidden coastal towns you can reach by train in Toscana
- The best coastal towns within two hours of Siena
A 7-day trip through the Tuscan Maremma, based in Grosseto
The best coastal towns in the province of Grosseto
The best small coastal towns in Toscana- The best towns with a serious restaurant that eat well within 90 minutes of Livorno