The best hill towns within 90 minutes of Pisa
The plain around Pisa gives way fast. Within the length of a slow drive you are among olive terraces, chestnut woods and villages built from grey sandstone that goes almost silver after rain, with the Apuan Alps showing their marble scars to the north and the Arno valley opening south. Autumn is the season that pays best here: white truffles around the lower Valdera and the hills above the Arno, new oil pressed in November, chestnut flour ground for necci and castagnaccio in the mountain villages. Spring brings wild asparagus and the first vermentino from the Ligurian side of the border, drunk cold with anchovies and focaccia.
Most people who land in Pisa look at the Leaning Tower for an hour and then drive straight to Florence or San Gimignano, and by mid-morning in summer the Piazza dei Miracoli is a queue with a lawn attached. San Gimignano in particular takes the weight of every day trip in the region, its towers photographed from the same spot by coach parties who arrive and leave inside the same afternoon. It is a fine town. It is also, between April and October, a difficult place to hear yourself think.
The hills those visitors are driving through do not stop at the famous names. The same sandstone ridges, the same oil, the same Romanesque parish churches with their blind arcading continue north into the Garfagnana and the Lunigiana, east towards the Valdera, and up into the marble country behind Versilia. Fewer people go, the restaurants take bookings the same week, and the towns in this list are all close enough to Pisa to be reached in a morning.
Of the 23 communes we have mapped in within 90 minutes of Pisa, 10 qualify as hill towns: each is an inland hill settlement. The smallest, Stazzema, has 2,856 residents.
If you are still choosing, we have also written The best hill towns in the province of Pisa and The best towns you can reach by train that have a serious restaurant within 90 minutes of Pisa.
Stazzema
Why visit Stazzema
Stazzema is the only entirely mountainous commune in Versilia, seventeen hamlets spread across the western slopes of the Apuan Alps, the highest point at Pania della Croce at 1,858 meters. The main village sits at 440 meters; Sant'Anna di Stazzema, the most-visited frazione, sits at 750 meters between Monte Ornato and Monte Gabberi.
On 12 August 1944 the Waffen-SS and the Italian Black Brigades killed around 560 villagers and refugees at Sant'Anna, more than a hundred of them children. The site became the Parco Nazionale della Pace in 2000, with a museum opened in 1982 by President Sandro Pertini.
The Antro del Corchia, accessed from Levigliani, runs 53 kilometers of mapped tunnels and is the largest karst system in Italy. The commune earned its Comuni Virtuosi signal for waste reduction and energy policy and its Città delle Grotte signal for the Corchia.
What to see in Stazzema
- Antro del Corchia. 53 kilometers of mapped tunnels and shafts in the Levigliani frazione, the largest karst system in Italy and one of the largest in Europe.
- Sant'Anna di Stazzema. Mountain frazione at 750 meters, site of the 12 August 1944 SS massacre and now the Parco Nazionale della Pace memorial complex.
- Museo Storico della Resistenza. Resistance and massacre museum in Sant'Anna's former primary school, inaugurated in 1982 by Sandro Pertini.
How to get to Stazzema
There is no station we could confirm here, so this one means driving. Pisa is roughly 65 minutes away by road.
Our tip
April through October works for the trails and the cave. June and September are the best brackets: long daylight, dry rock for the Pania ridge, and the Corchia interior holds at 7.6 degrees year-round so a guided visit needs a sweater regardless of season. July and August are warm enough at altitude but the parking at Sant'Anna and Levigliani fills early on weekends.
Peccioli
Why visit Peccioli
Peccioli sits at 144 meters in the Valdera, thirty kilometers southeast of Pisa, on a hill above the Era river. The historic center is medieval: the Pieve di San Verano is documented in 1171 in a papal bull of Alexander III, the layout standing today is twelfth and thirteenth century, and the bell tower beside it climbs forty-two meters above the rooftops.
What sets Peccioli apart is what happened after. In the 1990s the comune partnered with a private operator to build a waste treatment plant on the slope below town.
The Triangolo Verde, the green amphitheater built into the landfill site, hosts open-air concerts and contemporary-art installations. Revenue from the plant funds the Fondazione Peccioliper, a cultural foundation that since 2004 has commissioned sculptural and painted interventions throughout the borgo by international artists.
The village won the RAI Borgo dei Borghi contest in 2024 on that combination: medieval bones, open-air contemporary art, and a landfill that paid for it.
What to see in Peccioli
- Pieve di San Verano. Romanesque parish church documented in 1171, twelfth-century layout, with a forty-two meter bell tower beside it.
- Anfiteatro Fonte Mazzola. Open-air theater built in the shape of an ancient Greek amphitheater, two thousand seats, used for the Peccioli summer festival.
- Museo di Palazzo Pretorio. Civic museum on the main square, part of the Museum Complex that includes the archaeological collection and the Sacred Art museum.
How to get to Peccioli
There is no station we could confirm here, so this one means driving. Pisa is roughly 52 minutes away by road.
Our tip
April through June and September into October are the months when the Valdera hills are at their best and the open-air program at Fonte Mazzola and the Triangolo Verde runs without the heat. July and August push past thirty-three degrees and the centro storico empties between two and six. The summer festival, 11Lune, runs July with concerts, theater and contemporary-art openings in the public spaces of the borgo.
Licciana Nardi
Why visit Licciana Nardi
Licciana Nardi sits at 215 meters in the eastern Lunigiana, on the slopes of the Apennino Tosco-Emiliano National Park. The town is one of several Malaspina holdings in the valley, with a castle in the centro storico and another above Bastia, three kilometers up the ridge.
In 1933 the commune added the surname Nardi to its name in honor of Anacarsi Nardi, one of the Bandiera brothers' co-conspirators, shot by Bourbon firing squad in 1844 after the failed insurrection at Cosenza. The Apennine ridge above the town is part of the national park, with chestnut and beech forests, the Lagastrello pass, and trails connecting Lunigiana to the Garfagnana on the other side.
The local plate is panigacci, thin disks of unleavened dough cooked between terracotta plates and eaten with stracchino, salume, or pesto, a Lunigiana tradition shared with Pontremoli and the upper Magra villages.
What to see in Licciana Nardi
- Castello Malaspina di Licciana. Medieval Malaspina fortress in the centro storico, partly inhabited and partly visitable on request.
- Castello di Bastia. Smaller Malaspina castle in the frazione of Bastia, three kilometers up the ridge, with a fourteenth-century keep.
- Parco Nazionale dell'Appennino Tosco-Emiliano. Chestnut and beech forests on the ridge above the town, with the Lagastrello pass and trails into the Garfagnana.
How to get to Licciana Nardi
There is no station we could confirm here, so this one means driving. Pisa is roughly 79 minutes away by road.
Our tip
May through October is the season in the eastern Lunigiana. The ridge stays cooler than the lower valley, the chestnut woods are open, and the trails into the Apennine park run from Apella up to the Lagastrello pass. July and August are warm but breezy at altitude.
Fosdinovo
Why visit Fosdinovo
Fosdinovo sits at 500 meters on a ridge between the Apuan Alps and the Magra valley, with the Tyrrhenian visible on a clear day. The Castello Malaspina dominates the village: a fourteenth-century fortress on earlier foundations, continuously inhabited by the same family branch from 1340 until 1916, one of the longest unbroken castle dynasties in Europe.
Dante took shelter here in 1306, hosted by Moroello Malaspina, and the encounter became Canto VIII of the Purgatorio. The current owner is the same Malaspina line; the castle is open for guided tours that include the room where the poet is said to have slept.
The town sits at the southern edge of the Lunigiana, with the marble peaks of the Apuane behind and the Versilia coast in front. The Linea Gotica ran through these hills in 1944, and the Museo Audiovisivo della Resistenza in the centro storico documents what happened to the villages below.
What to see in Fosdinovo
- Castello Malaspina. Fourteenth-century fortress on earlier foundations, held by the same Malaspina branch from 1340 to 1916, with the Dante room open on guided tours.
- Museo Audiovisivo della Resistenza. Documentation center on the Gothic Line and the partisan war in the Apuane and Lunigiana, with films and oral histories.
- Centro storico. Walled village climbing the ridge below the castle, with stone houses and steep lanes between gardens facing the sea.
How to get to Fosdinovo
There is no station we could confirm here, so this one means driving. Pisa is roughly 70 minutes away by road.
✷ We have written about Fosdinovo
“We chose it the way you choose a card from a deck. We pulled up the map, ignored everything we recognized, scrolled north until the roads thinned out and the names stopped meaning anything to us, and there, behind the marble of Carrara, in a fold of the Apuane I had never heard of, was a borgo called Marciaso. There was one Airbnb.”
Read our piece on Fosdinovo →The Lunigiana | The Real Off the Beaten Path Italy
Our tip
April through June is the dry green window, with the Apuane still snow-streaked and the coast already warm below. July and August push the lowlands into the thirties; Fosdinovo at 500 meters stays a few degrees cooler and the breeze off the ridge holds. September and October are the second window, with the new oil from the lower slopes and the chestnuts higher up.
Castelnuovo Magra
Why visit Castelnuovo Magra
Castelnuovo Magra sits at 188 meters on the last ridge of Liguria before the Magra river marks the Tuscan border. The bishop-counts of Luni built their stronghold here between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, choosing the ridge for the view it commanded over the river crossing and the plain below.
The village grew around that fortified seat, with the centro storico still gathered close to the tower and castle ruins while the vineyards spread out below on the terraced slopes, the same ground that now carries the Colli di Luni Vermentino down toward the Magra. The Via Francigena skirts the ridge on its way down to Sarzana, threading olive groves rather than the village center itself, so the pilgrim route and the fortified hilltop have always belonged to slightly different lines of movement through this stretch of the border.
A reenactment in period costume, La Pace di Dante, marks the October anniversary of the 1306 treaty each year. What the ridge amounts to is a border post twice over: a line the bishops and marquises once fought to hold, and the line, still visible in the tower and the terraces, between the fortified hill and the vine-growing slopes it has always overlooked.
What to see in Castelnuovo Magra
- Turris Magna. Twelfth-century tower standing over the centro storico, the one built fragment left of the counts' fortifications that once ringed the ridge.
- Castello dei Vescovi di Luni. Ruins and a surviving wing of the bishop-counts' fortified residence. The room where the Peace of Castelnuovo was signed in Dante's presence in 1306 can still be traced among the standing walls.
- Chiesa di Santa Maria Maddalena. Parish church of the centro storico, holding a fifteenth-century Calvary attributed to the Brueghel circle.
How to get to Castelnuovo Magra
There is no station we could confirm here, so this one means driving. Pisa is roughly 59 minutes away by road.
✷ We have written about Castelnuovo Magra
“It has the best panorama in Liguria, full stop, and I do not think it is close. The reasons are two. The first is the obvious one. You are 266 meters up, the cliff is high enough that there is no rocky beach below to draw a crowd, the sea on one side is the Gulf of La Spezia with Portovenere across the water and the Cinque Terre fading north, and the view on the other side is the Magra running into its delta with the white Apuane behind it and Tuscany beyond.”
Read our piece on Castelnuovo Magra →Magra Delta Roadtrip | A Tagine, a Lighthouse, and a Dead Roman City
Our tip
April through June and September into October are the dry months on this ridge above the Magra. The vineyards green in spring and color in autumn. The Vermentino harvest runs from late August into September. Sapori D'Autunno falls in October.
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.
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.
✷ We have written about Barga
“We were trying to get to Garfagnana. It was July, the coast was unlivable, we pointed the car at the Serchio Valley with a vague idea of chestnut forests and cool air, and somewhere on the road up we took a turn we should not have taken and ended up at the gate of a town I had never heard of. Barga was today's accident.”
Read our piece on Barga →Barga | The Scottish Accent
Our tip
April through June and September into October are the working months in the middle Serchio valley: green pasture, mild days at 410 meters, walking weather to the Apuan ridges. The Opera Barga festival fills the Teatro dei Differenti in July with chamber concerts. The Sagra del Pesce e Patate runs for two weeks in August and brings Glasgow-Barga families home.
San Miniato
Why visit San Miniato
San Miniato runs along three hills at 150 meters above the lower Arno, halfway between Pisa and Florence. In 962, Otto I of Saxony made it one of the seats of imperial administration in central Italy; in 1218 Frederick II turned it into a tax collection point, and the brick tower he built between 1217 and 1223 still rises above the town, rebuilt in 1958 after the retreating Germans mined it in 1944.
The Via Francigena passes through. The Duomo, dedicated to Sant'Assunta and Santo Genesio, holds the asymmetrical clock tower called the Matilde.
What the town is mainly known for today comes from the woods around it. San Miniato produces roughly a quarter of Tuscany's white truffles, including a tuber of over two kilos found in 1954.
The National White Truffle Exhibition, running through the last three weekends of November, has been held in Piazza del Duomo since 1969.
What to see in San Miniato
- Rocca di Federico II. Thirty-meter brick tower built by Frederick II between 1217 and 1223, destroyed by retreating Germans in 1944 and rebuilt in 1958.
- Duomo di Santa Maria Assunta e San Genesio. Originally Romanesque cathedral with Gothic and Renaissance additions, dedicated to two patrons, with the asymmetrical Matilde clock tower as campanile.
- Palazzo dei Vicari dell'Imperatore. Medieval palace of the imperial vicars who governed San Miniato when it was an imperial administrative seat.
How to get to San Miniato
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 49 minutes away by road.
✷ We have written about San Miniato
“And then time passed, which is the part the town doesn’t tell you about, because the town only sees you on the day. The jars sat in the cupboard. We are not people who keep proper white truffle at home; almost nobody is. But we do buy black truffle now and then, and we don’t buy it on a hill behind a closed road. We buy it from a man named Marco who runs a food truck in a supermarket parking lot down on the Marina near us. He digs some of it himself and sells the rest for the farmers around him, and there is no shuttle bus.”
Read our piece on San Miniato →San Miniato | The Truffle I Couldn’t Taste
Our tip
April through June brings the long Tuscan spring, mild on the ridge with views clear to the Apennines. September and October are dry and gold, the same colors painters come for. November is the truffle month: the National White Truffle Exhibition fills Piazza del Duomo across three weekends, hotel rates double, restaurants book out weeks ahead. Fiera Mercato del Tartufo Bianco di Corazzano falls in the season.
Pontedera
Why visit Pontedera
Pontedera is a working town on the flat land where the Era meets the Arno, halfway along the railway between Pisa and Florence. Piaggio moved its aircraft works here in the 1920s; the Allies bombed the plant flat in 1943 and 1944, and out of the rebuilt halls in 1946 came Corradino D'Ascanio's first Vespa.
The town has run on that factory ever since. The Museo Piaggio, set in the old tooling workshop by the station, holds the world's largest Vespa collection, from the first 98cc series to the machines that crossed continents.
Around it is an ordinary Tuscan market city: a long pedestrian corso, a street market that serves the whole Valdera, and frequent trains in both directions. Nobody stays the night for postcards.
You come for the museum, the shopping streets, and the feel of the Tuscany that works for a living.
What to see in Pontedera
- Museo Piaggio. The world's largest Vespa collection, kept in the former tooling workshop on Viale Rinaldo Piaggio where Corradino D'Ascanio's 1946 prototype was built, alongside Gileras and the Ape in every variant.
- Teatro Era. The theatre that made a factory town matter to actors worldwide: Jerzy Grotowski moved his Workcenter here in 1986 and ran it until his death in 1999, and the research company still works inside the building.
- PALP Palazzo Pretorio. The old praetorian palace at the head of the corso, reworked as the town's exhibition hall, with rotating art shows carrying names far bigger than the town.
How to get to Pontedera
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 25 minutes away by road.
✷ We have written about Pontedera
“Pontedera, the town, we knew nothing about. The brain-dump version, which I will give you now and defend in a moment, is that Pontedera is a working factory town in the Valdera, and we have nothing in particular to say about it. Yes, there is a piazza, with a church, and some restaurants around it in an old town. But that is true to almost all Italian towns. We were there for the Museo Piaggio, in short: the Vespa museum. The museum is the reason to go.”
Read our piece on Pontedera →Pontedera | The Museum That Is More Than the Vespa
Our tip
April through October is the comfortable range, with the Valdera markets busiest on Saturday mornings. July and August are hot on the flat river land; the town keeps working through them but the piazza empties by early afternoon. The Museo Piaggio runs year-round and is an all-weather reason to come, which makes Pontedera one of the few towns here that a grey winter day does not close.
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.
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.
✷ We have written about Lucca
“We came in through Porta Santa Maria on a Tuesday afternoon in February, with the sun low and the wind off the Apuane sharp enough to flatten Sophia's coat against her, and there was nobody there. A man in a green trench was walking a dog. Two old women were having a conversation on a bench inside the wall, slowly, in dialect, with long pauses.”
Read our piece on Lucca →Lucca | The City You Cannot Photograph
Our tip
April through June and September through October bracket the year. May is the Lucca Classica music festival and the Lucca Biennale Cartasia in even years. October-November brings Lucca Comics & Games and the centro storico fills with around 300,000 attendees; book a year ahead.
Vicopisano
Why visit Vicopisano
Vicopisano sits at the foot of Monte Pisano where the plain of the Arno meets the hills, twenty kilometers east of Pisa. The town was a Pisan river port on the old course of the Arno until the river shifted south in the sixteenth century, leaving the walls inland.
Florence captured the town in 1407, which is what brought Brunelleschi and his engineering to a place that had until then belonged to Pisa's river trade rather than to Florentine territory. The fortress and its covered passage sit above the older watchtower and the parish church, all reachable by the lanes that climb from the walls toward the ridge of Monte Pisano.
The hills above carry the olive groves that earned the town its Città dell'Olio listing, so the same slope that gave Brunelleschi high ground to defend also gives the town its oil. What the plain lost when the Arno shifted, the hillside above supplied instead: first a port town, then a fortified inland one, and finally an agricultural one.
What to see in Vicopisano
- Rocca del Brunelleschi. Restored fortress open to visitors, built on the slope where the walls back onto Monte Pisano.
- Torre delle Quattro Porte. Twelfth-century watchtower with four arched gates, reinforced rather than built during the Brunelleschi works, the architectural symbol of the medieval town.
- Pieve di Santa Maria. Eleventh-century Romanesque parish church holding a wooden Deposition group carved around 1200, the second oldest such carving in Italy.
How to get to Vicopisano
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 33 minutes away by road.
Our tip
April through June is dry and green, with the Monte Pisano olive groves at their best. September and October are the second window, cool mornings and the start of the harvest. The Festa Medievale runs the first weekend of September, three days of jousts and costumed processions inside the Brunelleschi walls. Festa Medievale falls in September.
More from Anywhere Italy
The best hill towns in the province of Pisa- The best towns you can reach by train that have a serious restaurant within 90 minutes of Pisa
The best towns known for what they grow within two hours of Pisa- The best olive oil towns within 90 minutes of Pisa
The best towns with a serious restaurant in the province of Pisa- The best olive oil towns within two hours of Parma