What is Camaiore known for?

Wide Versilia beach with Bandiera Blu and a row of bagni concessions running back to the early 1900s belle époque. The pilgrimage route from Canterbury to Rome enters Camaiore at the Badia di San Pietro and leaves it eastbound for Lucca. Twelfth-century Romanesque church, the surviving piece of a Benedictine monastery first documented in 761 under Lombard rule.

When is the best time to visit Camaiore?

May–Sep. May through September runs the Versilia season at the Lido and gives the inland town its share of light evenings. June and September are the quieter brackets: warm enough for the sea, cool enough to walk the Francigena stages without losing the morning. July and August fill the Lido with families from Lucca and Milan, parking gets tight, and the inland piazze stay calmer than the seafront. October through April most beach concessions close. The inland town keeps a rhythm built around the Tuesday market, the Francigena pilgrims who still pass through in shoulder season, and the Sant'Antonio festa in mid-January.

Camaiore is a comune in the province of Lucca, Tuscany region of Italy, about 33 kilometers from Pisa.

How do I get to Camaiore?

From Pisa, Camaiore is roughly 33 km by road.

Tuscany · Lucca

Camaiore

The Versilia commune that runs from the mountains to the sea, a Roman Campus Maior on the Via Francigena with a beach at its western end.

Known for

LIDO DI CAMAIORE
Wide Versilia beach with Bandiera Blu and a row of bagni concessions running back to the early 1900s belle époque.
VIA FRANCIGENA
The pilgrimage route from Canterbury to Rome enters Camaiore at the Badia di San Pietro and leaves it eastbound for Lucca.
BADIA DI SAN PIETRO
Twelfth-century Romanesque church, the surviving piece of a Benedictine monastery first documented in 761 under Lombard rule.

When to visit

Best · May–Sep

Best
Hot or crowded
Quiet
Mostly closed

The festa: Santissimo Nome di Gesù, 1 June

Why come

Camaiore stretches from the Apuan Alps to the Versilia coastline, the only Versilia commune with substantial territory in both. The town center sits 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.

We've been

Feature from our free newsletter

I Could Get Old Here

I watched eight old men stand up at once, and something in me quietly rearranged itself. They had been sitting at Caffè Celero on Piazza San Bernardino for most of an hour, maybe longer, doing what men over sixty do on an Italian piazza, which is nothing, but nothing done carefully and particularly.

From the Camaiore letter, April 2026

Read the full feature on anywhereitaly.com

What to see

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.
Centro storico
Medieval grid along Via Vittorio Emanuele, walking distance from the original Roman castrum perimeter.
Via Francigena
Stage 26 from Massa enters at the abbey; Stage 27 leaves for Lucca through the eastern olive groves.
Grotta all'Onda
Prehistoric cave on the Casoli hill above the town, with Mesolithic and Neolithic finds in the Pisa archaeological museum.

The slow-trip planner

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Plan your trip

We’ve tried

What we got up to

Restaurants, walks, swims — the things we actually did in and around Camaiore, each with the piece we wrote about it.

The mountain hamlet that scratched its dead into the walls: Casoli.
Casoli | The Village That Decided to Be Interesting
The tordello, the meat-stuffed pasta that is Versilia telling you it isn't Lucca.
Tordello | What the tordello says
Erbe, the bitter boiled greens that make a kilo of rare beef sit like a virtue.
Erbe | The Greens on the Side

Living here

Population 31,842
A local hubi
Pharmacy in town
High school within a 30-minute drive
Train station in the comune
Nearest airport Florence / Pisa, 54 min drive
Regional capital Firenze, 1 h 29 min drive

Tags & datadesignations · numbers · sources

Recognised as

The numbers

Elevation: 34 m
Population: 31,842
Surface area: 85.43 km²

On the map

Google Maps Apple Maps Directions from Pisa

These figures were compiled from public directories — ISTAT, OpenStreetMap, Wikidata — and from the official listings of the guides named on this page. Town details change; verify with official sources before you travel.

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