The 6 best hidden coastal towns you can reach by train in Tuscany

1. Bibbona

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

51 min from Livorno · homes €1,450 to €1,800 a m² in the center · 3,174 people

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.

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

It has its own railway station. Livorno is about 51 min away by road. The full route from Pisa.

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2. Capalbio

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

1 h 48 min from Rome · homes €1,950 to €2,700 a m² in the center · 3,710 people

Written about. No. 47. Read the letter →

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.

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

It has its own railway station. Rome is about 1 h 48 min away by road. The full route from Rome.

Everything we know about Capalbio

3. Castagneto Carducci

Best for olive oil. It belongs to the national association of olive oil towns.

55 min from Livorno · homes €1,500 to €1,900 a m² in the center · 8,633 people

Written about. No. 37. Read the letter →

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.

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

It has its own railway station. Livorno is about 55 min away by road. The full route from Pisa.

Everything we know about Castagneto Carducci

4. Campiglia Marittima

Best for a soak. The comune has thermal baths.

1 h 7 min from Livorno · homes €1,350 to €1,750 a m² in the center · 12,301 people

Written about. No. 38. Read the letter →

Why visit Campiglia Marittima

Campiglia Marittima sits at 231 meters on the last slopes of the Colline Metallifere above the Val di Cornia, eight kilometers inland from the Tyrrhenian coast and 60 kilometers southeast of Livorno. The Rocca occupies the highest point at 281 meters, a fortified semicircle whose 14th-century tower and town walls trace the medieval defensive line.

The territory has been mined since the Etruscans: copper, silver, lead and tin from the hills behind town, worked continuously until the last galleries closed in 1976. The Parco Archeominerario di San Silvestro, opened in 1996 on 450 hectares behind the town, centers on Rocca San Silvestro, a tenth and eleventh-century miners' village abandoned in the fourteenth century and excavated since 1984.

Visitors enter through restored galleries on a small electric train. Down on the plain the DOC Val di Cornia produces Sangiovese and Cabernet, and the thermal springs at Venturina, the frazione south of town, have flowed since Roman use as Aquae Populoniae.

What to see in Campiglia Marittima

• Rocca di Campiglia. Fortified semicircle at 281 meters with the 14th-century tower, walls and the Pieve di San Giovanni, the highest point of the town.
• Parco Archeominerario di San Silvestro. 450-hectare park behind town, opened 1996, with restored mining galleries, a small electric train, and the abandoned medieval miners' village of Rocca San Silvestro.
• Centro storico. Walled hilltop borgo of stone houses, with Piazza della Repubblica at its center, the medieval gates Porta a Mare and Porta Fiorentina still intact.

How to get to Campiglia Marittima

It has its own railway station. Livorno is about 1 h 7 min away by road. The full route from Pisa.

Everything we know about Campiglia Marittima

5. Seravezza

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

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.

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6. Orbetello

Best for a long lunch. Food guides list two tables here.

2 h 4 min from Rome · homes €2,050 to €2,700 a m² in the center · 14,020 people

Written about. No. 52. Read the letter →

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.

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

It has its own railway station. Rome is about 2 h 4 min away by road. The full route from Rome.

Everything we know about Orbetello