The 6 best hidden coastal towns within 90 minutes of Pisa

1. Montignoso

Best for a soak. The comune has thermal baths.

52 min from Pisa · homes €1,000 to €1,500 a m² in the center · 10,071 people

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.

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

Pisa is about 52 min away by road. The full route from Pisa.

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2. Portovenere

Best for a World Heritage site. UNESCO lists a site in the comune.

1 h 23 min from Pisa · homes €3,900 to €5,800 a m² in the center · 3,201 people

Written about. No. 53. Read the letter →

Why visit Portovenere

Portovenere closes the western mouth of the Gulf of La Spezia, three kilometers south of the city by water, facing the islands of Palmaria, Tino and Tinetto across open water. The Roman Portus Veneris dates to at least the first century BC, named for a temple to Venus on the promontory that now carries the striped church at the harbor mouth.

Genoa took control in 1113 and fortified the town as the southern anchor of its Riviera defences, opposite Pisan Lerici across the gulf: the fortress above the harbor and the church on the rock were built to face each other's rival coast rather than each other. The upper town holds the castle and its Romanesque parish church, rebuilt after a fire in 1340 damaged that quarter; the single medieval street below runs parallel to the harbor, its plan unchanged since Genoa first laid the town out in the twelfth century.

The promontory church stands apart from both, reachable along the water's edge, with the sea cave that took Byron's name cut into the rock beneath it. A fortified street, a hilltop castle and a temple site turned church: the town reads as a defensive line built along a single spine of rock, with the gulf doing the rest of the work UNESCO recognized in 1997.

The catch: Homes in the center cost up to €5,800 a m².

What to see in Portovenere

• Chiesa di San Pietro. Consecrated 1198, black and white striped Gothic rebuild from 1256-1277, on the rocky promontory where the Roman temple of Venus stood.
• Castello Doria. First cited 1139, rebuilt 1161, expanded into the seventeenth century, the Genoese fortress above the harbor, prison under Napoleonic rule.
• Grotta dell'Arpaia. Sea cave below San Pietro, also called Byron's Grotto for the English poet who swam from here to Lerici across the gulf to visit Shelley.

How to get to Portovenere

Pisa is about 1 h 23 min away by road.

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3. Ameglia

Best for a walk through the old town. It is on the list of Italy's most beautiful villages.

1 h from Pisa · homes €1,350 to €2,900 a m² in the center · 4,262 people

Written about. No. 18. Read the letter →

Why visit Ameglia

The Magra was the Roman Macra, the eastern boundary of Liguria, and the hill at Ameglia stands on the border between Lunigiana and the Riviera where that river reaches the sea. Genoa bought part of the fief in 1141, the bishops took it back by 1284, and Castruccio Castracani of Lucca conquered it in 1321: a small fortress passed between larger powers for three and a half centuries before it settled into the shape it now has.

The marina at the river mouth is a separate world from the hill town above it. Where the castle and its concentric streets sit on the summit, the frazione at the water is a former fishing village, flat, tied to the tide and to summer moorings rather than to the bishops who once held the heights.

The two headlands south of that marina are reachable only by boat or steep footpath, cut off from the estuary settlement by their own geography rather than by distance. The town, in effect, is two places joined by the same river: a fortified height that answered to Luni and Genoa, and a working shoreline that answered to the sea.

What to see in Ameglia

• Castello di Ameglia. Rebuilt in 1174 on a tenth-century footprint, episcopal fortress of the bishops of Luni, cylindrical keep above the Magra estuary.
• Centro storico di Ameglia. Concentric medieval streets around the castle, twelfth and thirteenth-century houses with stone arches and external staircases.
• Bocca di Magra. Old fishing village and marina at the river mouth, summer mooring for small craft, departure point for Punta Corvo by sea.

How to get to Ameglia

Pisa is about 1 h away by road.

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4. Forte dei Marmi

Best for a day out from Pisa. It is 38 min by car.

38 min from Pisa · homes €5,100 to €11,100 a m² in the center · 6,666 people

Written about. No. 5. Read the letter →

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 a Blue Flag, the international award a comune has to win back every year on water quality, beach management and safety.

The catch: Homes in the center cost up to €11,100 a m².

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

Pisa is about 38 min away by road.

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5. Lerici

Best for a swim. The comune's beach holds a Blue Flag.

1 h 1 min from Pisa · homes €2,800 to €5,900 a m² in the center · 9,245 people

Written about. No. 17. Read the letter →

Why visit Lerici

The Gulf of La Spezia takes its eastern shore here, and the playwright Sem Benelli named that shore the Bay of Poets in 1910, nearly a century after Byron and Shelley made it their address. The fortress that defines the harbor 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 harbor 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 harbor fills with sailing dinghies all summer. Upper fortress and lower water, working harbor 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 a Blue Flag, the international award a comune has to win back every year on water quality, beach management and safety.

The catch: Homes in the center cost up to €5,900 a m².

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 harbor 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

Pisa is about 1 h 1 min away by road.

Everything we know about Lerici

6. Seravezza

Best for a trip without a car. The train stops in the commune.

44 min from Pisa · homes €1,400 to €1,950 a m² in the center · 12,381 people

Written about. No. 70. Read the letter →

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.

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

It has its own railway station. Pisa is about 44 min away by road. The full route from Pisa.

Everything we know about Seravezza