The best towns with a serious restaurant that sit on a walking route within 90 minutes of Pisa

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.

Pasticceria Gemmi il Loggiato, Il Cardinale Vino e Cucina, Piccolo Ristorante and 1 more have been named by a guide.

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.

Everything we know about Sarzana

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.

Alex, La Martinatica, Filippo and 6 more have been named by a guide.

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.

Everything we know about Pietrasanta

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.

Papaveri e Papere, Pepenero, Antico Ristoro Le Colombaie and 1 more have been named by a guide.

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.

Everything we know about San Miniato

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.

Il Merlo, Quinto Quarto, La Dogana and 1 more have been named by a guide.

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.

Everything we know about Camaiore

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.

Extra, Il Narciso, Enoteca Velia have been named by a guide.

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.

Everything we know about Carrara

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.

Antica Locanda di Sesto, Nida, All'Olivo and 8 more have been named by a guide.

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.

Everything we know about Lucca