Seravezza

Seravezza sits 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.