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Close your eyes and picture an Italian town. I’d bet that 99 out of a 100 of you just saw the same thing: a medieval walled town sitting on top of a hill, or on the edge of a cliff, with a bell tower sticking out of the middle. The term “hilltop town” should be copyrighted to Italy. Yes, plenty of other European countries have fortified medieval towns on higher ground. But somehow, we associate this image with Italy and nowhere else.

In this piece, I’m not going to give you the single reason why, because I don’t believe there is one. I’ll give you a few candidates instead. The truth is probably all of them, doing their thing at the same time.

First of all, a confession. I didn't coin this (it probably belongs to Peter Zeihan or Jared Diamond), but you can explain all of human history and societal trends with two scientific practices: basic demography and geography. So, throughout this essay, you will find most of the references in basic demographic insights and geographical absolutes.

Second, a personal note. I grew up below the Mátra, the highest mountain range in present-day Hungary. I even carry the name. Benei means “someone from Bene.” Local legend says Bene was a Hun chieftain, a sort of junior Attila, who built a small fortress up in the Mátra. The ruins standing there today are medieval, so the legend is probably doing some heavy lifting. But the stream below still carries his name. Half of my family worked the valleys at the foot of the Mátra, and the other half came from the northern side of the ridge, proper mountain people.

What I’m trying to say is that I know both sides and both ways of thinking. There’s valley-thinking: abundance, anything goes, life is full of opportunity. And there’s mountain-thinking: everything has to be preserved, rationed and carefully managed, because nobody knows what tomorrow brings. The two are like yin and yang. Night and day. One of my grandmother peeled potatoes by scratching the skin off with a knife. The other carved the skin off, losing some of the outer rims of the potato. Guess which had the valley-thinking.

Valleys usually have a river. They’re easy to cultivate, they give constantly, and they allow an abundant life. As you learned in school, the earliest civilizations were river-valley civilizations, and even today, the most powerful cities are built along rivers. But valleys are hard to defend. Anyone who has read anything about military tactics knows that fighting a defensive battle on lower ground is a nightmare.

Mountains, on the other hand, lack resources, and the people who live there are used to a harder life. Some historians called the Mediterranean’s mountains a factory that produced men for other people’s use: soldiers, migrants, labourers, all sent down to the rich plains. Mountains are like deserts or steppes. They’re the edges, the margins of civilization.

As a Hungarian, I also know that sometimes people on horseback with arrows come out of those margins and conquer everyone living in the valleys. Almost every river-valley civilization ended up the same way: people from the mountains, deserts or steppes came down and installed a new order. The other way around is rare, slow and expensive, because there is no better place on this planet to defend than the top of a hill.

Italy is less tumultuous than the Middle East, thankfully. If I have to give you the TLDR version of hill vs river history here, it goes like this.

• The first Italian civilizations started on hills overlooking rivers. The Etruscans, the Umbri, the early Romans, all of them.

• Someone conquered it all: the Romans. Peace followed, and people came down from the hills. Many new Roman towns were built on lower ground, along the roads. Florence and Lucca both started on the flat.

• Rome fell, and the peace was over. Towns on lower ground were easy to sack.

• At first, people simply moved back up the hills. Then, long after the Lombards, around the turn of the millennium, it became clear that nobody was going to restore order any time soon, and the hill towns started walling themselves in.

• For the next eight or nine hundred years, even as civilization carried on, the people who went uphill stayed uphill. Most of the hilltop towns you see today were shaped in this era, the medieval and Renaissance centuries.

• The railways started pulling people back down in the 1800s, and after the Second World War the move became a flood. It’s still going, which is why so many hilltop towns are getting older and emptier every year.

In even shorter terms: in peacetime, valleys thrive. In wartime, hills are a matter of survival. And it doesn’t take a full war. In Italy’s case, the absence of anyone strong enough to keep order was enough. No war, just uncertainty, chaos and unpredictability, for centuries.

Historians have a name for the great climb: incastellamento, a term coined by Pierre Toubert. His point was that it wasn’t only about safety. With no king or emperor strong enough to keep order, local lords filled the gap. They built a castle on a hill and moved the peasants inside, because people behind a wall are easier to count, tax and put to work. Other parts of Europe have castle towns too: southern France, parts of Spain, Greece, the valleys of the Alps. But nowhere I know has them packed this close together.

In the north and the centre of Italy, the towns had one big advantage: the boss was away. The north technically belonged to the Holy Roman Emperor, a German king living on the far side of the Alps who showed up every few decades with an army.

The centre belonged to the Pope, who for most of the 1300s wasn’t even in Italy, he was in Avignon. So the towns ran themselves. The citizens elected their own consuls, raised their own militias, minted their own coins and built their own walls. These were the communes, little city-states, and they spent a good part of their energy fighting the next hill over.

Only later, as the communes decayed, did single families take over, like the Medici in Florence or the Baglioni in Perugia. Later still came the foreign dynasties, the Spanish Habsburgs in Milan and the Bourbons in Parma, and the popes came back to take their towns back one fortress at a time.

That’s why you can tell a Ligurian, a Piedmontese, a Venetian and a Tuscan hill town apart. Each one was shaped by whoever was fighting over it. The walls of most Tuscan towns? They’re the result of Florence, Siena, Pisa and Lucca spending three centuries trying to eat each other. Monteriggioni is Siena walling itself against Florence, and Lucca’s walls are Lucca making sure Florence never got in. The fortresses in the Apuan Alps and along the Ligurian coast? Those are what’s left of Pisa’s collapse and the rise of Florence and Genoa to fill the gap.

Almost everything on the postcards and in the tourism ads of northern and central Italy is a consequence of competing powers in the late medieval and Renaissance eras. And that competition existed because nobody had dominated this land since the Romans.

The south was different, because the king wasn’t away. He lived there. The Normans built a single kingdom in the 1100s, and after them came the Angevins, the Aragonese, the Spanish and the Bourbons. The south had hill towns, walls and castles too, plenty of them. But the town belonged to a baron, and defence was the king’s business. In 1231, Frederick II banned towns from electing their own magistrates, and feudalism in the south lasted until 1806. Same hills, different question: whose town is it? In the north and centre, the walls belonged to the citizens. In the south, the town belonged to the lord.

And here comes our friend, Mr. Geography. Look at a map of Italy, then at the baseline numbers. The country is about 42% hills, 35% mountains, and only 23% plains. The whole peninsula is one never-ending mountain ridge, with hills of every height, valleys in between, and the sea around the edges. Yes, the most prosperous periods in Italian history grew out of the valleys. But when things got a bit too chaotic, it was just so damn easy to retreat up the nearest hill.

Also, not many people know this, but malaria was a huge thing in Italy. Many valleys and coastal plains were marshes, and marshes meant malaria. It took centuries of drainage, then DDT after the Second World War, before the disease was gone. Italy was only officially declared malaria-free in 1970. I know this story well, because the history of Versilia, where I live, is full of malaria.

Then came the railways, which can’t climb, so they ran through the valleys. Stations were built at the bottom of the hill, sometimes several kilometers below the town, and a new settlement grew around each one. Then came the factories on the flat land, and after the war the cars and highways, which also follow the valleys.

This is why almost every hilltop town has a younger cousin down below. Same commune, just in the valley. Inland, it’s often called scalo, which means stop or landing: Orvieto Scalo, Narni Scalo. On the coast, once the marshes and the pirates were gone, it’s called Marina di Whatever. I live in one of these cousins myself: Marina di Pietrasanta, with the old town of Pietrasanta up against the hill behind me. Most of these lower towns are between a hundred and a hundred and fifty years old. Babies, by Italian standards.

So why does Italy have so many hilltop towns, and why do they all look alike? As you can see (or read), there’s no single answer. The hills were safe during the chaos, the towns drove each other’s competition, and in a country where almost all livable land is either on a hill or next to one, it was the obvious place to build. It’s no wonder Rome was founded on hills.

The reason matters less, I think. The consequences matter more. Because these towns were close to one another, walled off from each other and competing, almost everything you love about Italy comes, directly or indirectly, from them.

The language is the most obvious. Italian is old as a written language. It’s basically Dante’s Florentine. But as a spoken language, most Italians only picked it up in the last seventy years, mostly from television. Before that, every town, every valley and every region had its own dialect. The differences are small between neighbouring towns, but put a Calabrian grandma in a room with a Piedmontese grandpa and watch them try to understand each other.

The food is the second most obvious. The shapes of the pasta, the type of bread, the salami, the pastry. As a foreigner, it’s funny to watch a town defend its pasta and insist it is soooo different from the pasta in the next town, when the real difference is the shape.

But hey, I get it. For them, food is identity, and it’s a direct consequence of the hilltop mentality. The Italians have a word for that mentality: campanilismo, loyalty to whatever you can see from your own bell tower.

Art is another one, and I’d argue the Renaissance couldn’t have happened anywhere except Italy, for exactly this reason. Every town competed with the next, and when there was no war to fight, they competed in other ways. Art was one of them. I don’t know anywhere else on Earth where a town of barely two thousand people has world-class art and architecture at this density.

The piazza. Everyone says Italians treat the main square like their living room. Of course they do. In a hilltop town, the main square is the only flat surface on the hill. The whole town is narrow alleys and steep climbs, except that one square. So people flock to it, live on it, build their bars around it, and it wouldn’t be Italy if there weren’t a church there too. It’s the town’s living room because it’s the only room.

Then there’s the administrative chaos. I’m from Hungary, and I thought Hungarian paperwork was a horror story. Then I moved to Italy and learned what a horror story really is. I can’t even describe Italian bureaucracy properly. Imagine chaos merged with an immovable object, multiply it by a 1,000, and you’re getting close to an Italian municipality. The smaller, the worst. One of the roots is the hilltop mentality. Italy has almost 8,000 separate municipalities, and most of them have fewer than 5,000 people. No sane nation on this planet would keep a separate council and mayor in places that small. But try merging two Italian towns, or taking away their mayor, and they’ll feel annexed. Hilltop thinking again.

Cars. Italy has one of the highest car-ownership rates in Europe, and public transport is a joke of its own (though the railways are getting better). It’s easy to see why. Trains don’t go up hills. Everyone relies on their own wheels.

And then there’s family and community. This is an oversimplification, and plenty of Italians would argue with it today, but in most hill towns, family and the local community came before anything else: before the region, before the state, and obviously before Rome (Rome itself is universally either hated or ignored by Italians, except, of course, Romans, who are famously playing the same game with the rest of Italy). When these towns emptied out, with people leaving for the factories of the north or for America and Argentina, they organized themselves by village. In New York, whole streets were settled by people from the same village in Sicily or Calabria. The same happened in the northern Italian cities. Mutual-aid societies, hometown associations and a whole local civil society grew out of those old village loyalties. And I don’t even mention the word that you might be thinking, but yes, even that has its roots in the stateless hilltop ‘we are on our own’ mentality.

And lastly, yes, tourism. These towns are what everyone pictures when they plan a trip to Italy. But there’s an irony here. They were built to keep strangers out, and now they live off strangers. Another irony is how they were built: for mules, carts and horses. Today there’s usually one parking lot (always full), steep climbs (only the big ones like Perugia get escalators), narrow alleys and a small square. Visitors flood the 10 most photographed towns within easy reach of Rome or Florence, and those towns were simply never built for crowds. Their entire purpose was to keep people out, and now they’re drowning in them.

Meanwhile, aside from your usual San Gimignano, Montepulciano, Volterra, and other famous towns, most of the same-looking ones are still emptying out. Not that it would be my job to solve this problem, not that I can—but this is why Anywhere Italy was born anyway: to highlight the 1,000 towns most people skip on their trips. Check out our mission.

Frankly, I don’t care whether you have a good trip to Italy or not. To be even more frank, I think the country would be better off with fewer tourists. Since I can’t change that, all I can hope for is something more sustainable: visits that take pressure off the crowded towns and bring some life back to the skipped ones.

So visit the hilltop towns your hotel doesn’t market. Don’t just do the day trip. Sleep there, even for a single night, and watch the town close its shutters after dark and open them again in the morning, the way it has been doing for eight hundred years. These towns were built to outlast whoever was coming up the road. They’ll outlast us too.

Hi, I’m Peter, and you’re reading Anywhere Italy. Our mission is to cover the 1,000 Italian towns most travelers skip, in person, one at a time. Come along for free, or pay if you want to keep us on the road.

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There is a window in the Villa Farnese at Caprarola where you can sit for an entire afternoon, looking down the long straight street a cardinal cut through the middle of the town, knocking down whatever stood in the way so his guests could arrive at his door in a proper procession. We did exactly that on a Saturday in July. In the whole building, a palace good enough to stand in for the Vatican in a Hollywood film, there were maybe ten people, including us.

That afternoon is Tuscia. It is the country north of Rome: the province of Viterbo and the old Etruscan coast, a volcanic plateau of soft tuff, crater lakes and hazelnut groves that was a civilization before Rome was a village of huts. Rome took it twice. First came the legions, one Etruscan city at a time, until the people who had given Rome its kings, its arches and its gladiators simply became Romans. Then came the Popes, who ran it for centuries as the Church’s farm, building palaces for cardinals and leaving everyone else in simple houses. Both conquests left the same thing behind: a land full of extraordinary things with almost nobody looking at them.

We lived in Rome for a year and came up here more often than anywhere else. Ronciglione is where the idea behind this publication was born. This Guide is the map of the first patch of Italy we found for ourselves.

In a nutshell aka TLDR

This is not Tuscany, and that is the point. Drive down from Florence through the Val d’Orcia and the Maremma, and everything is in order: villas, estates, farms, a nine out of ten on any aesthetic chart. Cross into Tuscia and you drop four or five points within an hour. Centuries of Papal rule explain why. Expect working towns, rough edges, and a few ugly post-war blocks. In return you get places nobody performs for.

There is nothing to do, and that is what you came for. Ronciglione has a gate, a cathedral, and two or three main streets. Capranica has maybe ten streets and an old town. Most of these towns have one sight, or none. The day goes to a coffee table on the main square, a walk along the walls after dark, and watching the whole town head home for lunch at 12:30.

The sights are empty. The Villa Farnese, a palace that rivals the Vatican, had ten people in it on a July Saturday. At the Monster Park in Bomarzo, we were the only visitors. The Etruscan cemeteries at Tarquinia and Cerveteri are the Italian answer to the Pyramids, and most people driving to Rome pass them without stopping.

Bring a car and some Italian. These towns sit on tuff ridges off the Via Cassia and the lake roads. We did all of it by car, and I would not try it any other way. Almost no foreigners come here. When we tried to order a pizza in Capranica, it took an American stranger to rescue us. Bomarzo’s garden isn’t even signposted from the village.

Everything is close. Caprarola, Ronciglione and Capranica cluster around Lake Vico, a short drive from each other. Viterbo is the city of the region, with Bomarzo twenty minutes east. The coast, with Tarquinia and Cerveteri, is your road back to Rome. Stay a week, sleep in one bed, and do the rest as day trips.

The easy win: Ronciglione. It’s where we slept, again and again.

Where to base yourself

Ronciglione. This is where it started for us. We came for a romantic weekend in 2021, canceled whatever we had planned next to come back for two more weeks, and returned a year later for my birthday. It is fifteen minutes from Caprarola, Lake Vico sits right below it, and every other place in this Guide is a day trip away. Paola’s estate, Relais Villa Lina, is bookable and has the pool.

The places not to miss

Caprarola and the Villa Farnese. A pentagonal palace at the top of a town that was demolished and rebuilt to serve as its driveway. The Farnese story, from a Pope’s mistress to a fourteen-year-old cardinal, runs through half of this Guide, and this is where it was built in stone. Give it a full day. The garden behind the villa is a trip on its own, and the interiors doubled for the Vatican in The Two Popes.

Lake Vico. The volcanic crater the whole corner circles around, ten minutes below Caprarola. There is a beach, and there are restaurants built out on piers at the water’s edge. Go for a late dinner and watch the sun go down over the lake.

Capranica. A medieval town on a tuff ridge above the Via Cassia, and our first real small town in Italy. It has nothing to see except itself after dark, when it goes back to being the village it was five hundred years ago. It is also a stop on the Via Francigena, the pilgrim road from Canterbury to Rome that gets a fraction of the Camino’s walkers. Park on the Cassia below, buy a pizza, and sit on the walls.

Viterbo and Bomarzo. Viterbo is where the popes ran the Church for a couple of decades in the thirteenth century, when Rome would not have them. Its San Pellegrino quarter is the largest intact thirteenth-century district in Europe. The city also took heavy Allied bombing, and the post-war blocks dropped into its medieval streets are part of the visit. Twenty minutes east is the Sacred Grove of Bomarzo: a private, barely signposted wood full of giant stone monsters, built by a soldier for his dead wife.

Tarquinia and Cerveteri. The Etruscan coast, on the road down to Rome. Almost nothing is left of these two cities except their cemeteries. The Etruscans built their houses from wood and mud and their tombs from stone, and the tombs are why you come. The coast itself is flat and, honestly, a bit boring. The necropolises and their museums are not. Cerveteri also works as a day trip from Rome.

Tuscia’s food

Tuscia has no dish the world can name, and I am not going to borrow one from Rome. What it has is quieter.

Hazelnuts. Between every two towns around Lake Vico, the roads run through endless hazelnut groves. This is the Nocciola Romana DOP, and a big share of it goes north to Ferrero in Piedmont. Tuscia grows the nut and Piedmont gets the name. Very Papal States of it.

France’s oldest wine. The Etruscans shipped wine and vines to Lattara on the coast of Gaul, which is the oldest winemaking evidence in France. The full story, and the French humiliation, is in the Tarquinia piece.

Coming from Tuscany

Most people cross Tuscia by accident, on the drive from Florence to Rome. The Tuscan half of that drive has its own Guide.

The final note

This guide is alive. I update it whenever a new piece on Tuscia goes up.

Everything in here is a place I have been to personally. I don’t write about restaurants I haven’t eaten at or towns I haven’t walked through. If a place is in this guide, it’s because I went, ate, learned something, and decided it was worth your time. Tuscia is where I learned that rule. Ronciglione was on no list, and it changed how we travel.

Guide last updated: 24 September 2026

Hi, I’m Peter, and you’re reading Anywhere Italy. Our mission is to cover the 1,000 Italian towns most travelers skip, in person, one at a time. Come along for free, or pay to keep us on the road.

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I’ll be moving to Turin in a couple of weeks, so I am wrapping up my life here in Versilia. Aside from logistics, I have realized I have never written about the mountains above Versilia, even though we have visited them countless times. I once wrote about Carrara and the marble, and also about the lardo in Colonnata. And I also did a documented roadtrip through Lunigiana and Garfagnana, but those are the other side of the mountains here in Versilia, running through the valleys.

So, where are we? We are in Pietrasanta. I’ve been living here for the last three years. In front of me is the sea. Behind me are the mountains. Almost everything is about these two things. The sea gives you food (the best seafood ever) and tourism. The mountains give you mostly marble. Carrara marble is world-famous, extremely expensive, and has a heritage traced back to the Roman Empire. Which means, around here, most people either mine, package, ship, trade, or sell the marble. Or they are artists who create beautiful marble sculptures from it. Pietrasanta is the capital of sculpture, with modern art exhibitions, operating galleries, and still-functioning workshops. Forte dei Marmi is like a fashion-nerd festival from Milano, with a pop-up town by the sea, luxury brands, and excessive lifestyle.

And you have the working towns and villages. The ones who make this lavish life possible for hundreds of years. No songs are written about them, and rarely does anyone visit them who is not local. Colonnata somehow got its fame because of its lard. But almost no one knows about Seravezza or Stazzema. Maybe some people saw The Miracle at St. Anna, a Spike Lee war movie. Which was universally hated here, by the way, but more on that later.

First, the why. You might have a different why than us. We go up to these towns for the same reason: to escape. There are bus routes, but trust me, you need a car to go up there. The roads are super windy, curve after curve, and locals drive 3x as fast as the speed limit, and it is a miracle that only a few people die on these roads. In places, the road goes straight into the mountain, through unlit tunnels cut for marble trucks, wide enough for a truck and nothing to spare, and you come out the other side with the drop on your side. Seravezza is at the bottom of the mountains, so it is easier to reach. Stazzema and especially its little villages are almost an hour’s drive from the sea. So you have to be really committed to going there. Which makes it an escape.

Once you are there, three things alone make it worth the hassle. First, the absolute drama of a view.

You mostly see two different mountains, both of them worked for marble. One is Monte Altissimo, cut into the rock on its flanks, above Seravezza. The other is Monte Corchia, above Levigliani, worked on the outside and hollow on the inside: the largest cave system in Italy runs through it, and water made that one, not us. Both mountains give up more than marble. Under Levigliani, mercury workings were already written down in the twelfth century, and the mercury sits in the rock there as liquid metal, which is close to unique in the world. Everyone in these towns either works the mountain or works for it: logistics, yards, management. The only tourism here is the guided tours into the mine and the cave. Whichever town you climb up to, the views will be extreme.

The second reason for a visit is the food. You know about the lard of Colonnata. That describes the food that is eaten here: fatty, hearty, meaty, and meant for locals to serve as fuel for work. There are also mushrooms, I went to a restaurant in Seravezza once and wrote about their mushroom menu. Here, there is no room for plating and design. Also, don’t expect small portions or anything fancy. If it says “grilled meat mix,” you will get some sausages, pork, and chops, grilled, salt and pepper, ciao. No salads or whatever, it comes with potato and bread, what more do you want? Also, you want seafood? Not here.

The third is the people. I think I mentioned it in my Carrara piece, but anarchism in Italy took root among the quarrymen of Carrara, and the national federation was founded there after the war. Not a coincidence. On the other side of the mountain, in Stazzema and Seravezza, it’s more like red shirts. But honestly, it’s the same: you don’t get to tell us what to do, we are living on our own terms here. Rules are the rules that we think are the rules, not what the region, the provincial capital, or whatever Rome wants. What is Rome anyway? We don’t know, we don’t care. I’m exaggerating, but you get it: people here are very straightforward, zero flattery, and live a much simpler life. I personally love this and prefer it over snobbery, but I know it is not everyone’s cup of tea.

And it is not only a temperament. In 1794, sixty-seven heads of household in Levigliani bought the Corchia and its woods from the Grand Duke of Tuscany and decided to hold the mountain in common rather than divide it among themselves. That arrangement is still running today, two hundred and thirty years later. The quarries, the mine, the cave, the museum, all of it is worked by a cooperative that the villagers own. Three hundred and fifty people up there, and no unemployment, on a mountain where every other village has been emptying for fifty years. They did not wait for anyone to come and fix it. They bought the mountain.

Now, the entire Alta Versilia, the mountains above Versilia, is mainly about two towns: Seravezza and Stazzema. Carrara and Massa are on the other side, not really part of this map, and anything east of Camaiore is mostly part of Lucca anyway. So, let’s go to these towns.

Seravezza

As said, the entire region is about the marble. But you can go up to these towns now largely because of Michelangelo. No joke.

Michelangelo’s sculptures, the Pietà or the David, are all made from Carrara marble. Florence paid the principality of Massa and Carrara for it, an independent principality from the fifteenth century until Napoleon, which is very, very rare, since almost all of this area was ruled by Pisa, Florence, or Genoa. Then, after Michelangelo became famous for his work, they asked him to do the facade of the Medici family church in Florence, San Lorenzo. Since it’s a church, the Pope paid for it, who, by the way, was also a Medici (Leo X, Giovanni de’ Medici), and he had just handed Pietrasanta and the surrounding villages, including Seravezza and Stazzema, over to Florence. So our boy Mickey was asked to source the marble from Pietrasanta’s villages, not from Carrara. Spend the money in the Pope’s new country. Nothing is funnier than Renaissance meritocracy.

So he did. But the problem was that Massa and Carrara had the infrastructure, roads, a port, centuries of practice, while Seravezza and Stazzema had the same rock and nothing else. There wasn’t a road, and there wasn’t a loading bay at the sea. So Michelangelo spent three years up in the mountains, basically acting like a foreman, building a road system that could get that quantity of marble out of the mountain and down to the water. The end of the marble road became the town now called Forte dei Marmi, because hundreds of years later they built a fort there to protect the loading bay. The fort is still there and currently serves as an exhibition space. The contract for the church was cancelled, so Michelangelo spent three years for nothing, and San Lorenzo still stands in Florence today with a bare brick face, five hundred years later. But at least Seravezza and Stazzema got connected, the marble had a way down, and Versilia as a whole got a big economic boost.

Seravezza sits where two mountain torrents meet, the Serra and the Vezza. What comes out of the joining is the river Versilia, which gave the whole region its name. A Medici villa sits on the bank, built because the family had no suitable palazzo to stay in when they came up to inspect the quarries. Again, the whole town was about the marble, so the houses were all workers’ houses, unsuited for royalty. The places here are also this simple. No wine bars, but it is one of the few places up here with a beer terrace (Birreria la casa sul fiume, literal translation: pub in the house by the river). The mushroom restaurant I mentioned, Ulisse, is here too. Pizzerias. The fanciest place is on the main square, La Forchetta (the fork), and you know it’s fancy because it serves seafood.

There are many little hamlets belonging to Seravezza as you drive up toward Monte Altissimo, their mountain. The best views are in Azzano and Basati. Also, don’t be surprised if half of the bars, cafés, and restaurants are called Michelangelo. You know the story of why. You can’t miss with any of them. All of them serve local food for local people, so it is amazing.

Stazzema

Stazzema is a different beast. It’s much higher up, and it requires real commitment to drive up there. If you look on the map, Stazzema as a town sits off the main road that runs through the mountains. It is up, way up, and you can reach it only by driving through back roads. When I said “main road,” I have to note that even that road is extremely curvy and narrow.

The town of Stazzema is small, much smaller than Seravezza. It is also very old, mostly empty, and the only people you might see here, aside from the few locals, are hikers. The air is as fresh as it can be. If you are coming here in summer, as we always do, you step out of the car and the temperature drops ten degrees, and after weeks of humid nights by the sea, that alone is worth the hour of driving.

Two of Stazzema’s hamlets sit on the road up, Levigliani and Terrinca, and both are worth parking and walking into. Retignano is off on its own spur, higher again, and you go there on purpose or not at all. On the road there is an amazing restaurant, simply called L’Osteria. Definitely plan your time to visit. The mixed grill plate is amazing, and so are the mountain views.

And then there is what the mountain did on its own, on the nineteenth of June, 1996. A storm parked itself over these slopes and did not move for eight hours. Nearly half a metre of rain fell on Pomezzana. The hillsides came down and dammed the streams above Cardoso, one of Stazzema’s villages, and in the early afternoon all of the dams let go at once. The wave took Cardoso apart. Twelve people died there, fourteen in all, and one of them was never found. Then the water carried on down through Pontestazzemese and Ruosina and Seravezza, out across the plain, and broke the banks near Pietrasanta, and reached the sea at my beach and at Forte dei Marmi. Thirty years this June. Every year on the day, they run a torch relay from the river mouth up to the mountain, and light the Monte Forato above the valley.

You drive past Cardoso to get to Levigliani. It looks rebuilt, because it was rebuilt, by the people who were still there.

If you need a destination, I recommend Isola Santa. It's past some of these villages, even deeper in the mountains. It's a small village that was flooded halfway by a nearby dam, so only a couple of houses remain. It's the most secluded place there, worth a visit. Also, there is no point returning from there; just drive up toward Garfagnana until you reach Castelnuovo di Garfagnana. Then, as I detailed in my trip article, turn east and continue the road down to Lucca.

Whichever way you go, the two towns with their two mountains should stay with you. Everything comes and goes here. The mountain takes, and the mountain gives. Life is not that complicated, but it is hard to drive through.

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I wanted to write about Peccioli for so long, not just because it was so great when we visited this town, but also because it is a great story to tell if you are into urban planning and community management. The story also has giants.

A disclaimer first, mostly for the Italians reading: nobody in Peccioli pays me, sponsors me, or has any hold over me. So when I write that Renzo Macelloni, the mayor, is a genius of the giant-sized kind, I mean it. This piece is about a town with giants that won Best Village in Italy two years ago. It is also about what happens when a small town dares to dream big.

Our story begins in the late 1980s. Peccioli was a small farming village in Tuscany with a badly managed landfill on one of its slopes. This was the 1980s, so no Eat Pray Love and no one wrote about the cedar trees, hilltop towns, and olive groves in that cheesy romantic way. Tourism was almost non-existent, at least not in Peccioli. It was also closer to Pisa, and I wrote about a road trip before, on the road to Siena, where you can drive to Siena in two ways. One of them is truly beautiful, the other is… well, Peccioli is on this other way. Industrial area, farming, working, fewer cedar trees and more John Deere. Nothing romantic here. It still isn’t, to be honest, but imagine it in the 1980s, before fridge magnets.

Florence closed its landfill, and the entire Tuscany region wanted to close all non-functioning landfills. This was when the North started shipping trash to the South because, I don’t know, this is one of the few feuds between Northern and Southern Italy. But then came Renzo Macelloni, who was the mayor of Peccioli, even back then, a local dude, and he said to the Regional board: “Give me the money that you would pay for shipping your junk. I will rebuild my dump, expand it, and take your trash for a fee.”

Tuscany said yes. And ever since the early 90s, Peccioli has been taking in almost half of Tuscany’s trash, putting it into a modern landfill, generating energy from the rotting waste in the form of biogas, more than the community needs, and also collecting a fee for handling the waste from the government and trash companies. The landfill paid the town millions of euros. Even some of their citizens- around 900 of them are shareholders in the landfill itself. Renzo Macelloni is the CEO of the company that manages the landfill and, as of today, the town's mayor.

Of course, every brave dreamer has to fight shortsighted people, so Renzo got some criticism that this mayor-CEO duo-in-one might not be the best idea. Also, the landfill recycles less trash than regional laws require. If you’ve spent any time in Italy, you would know that recycling and selective waste collection are like a religion around here. Renzo says he doesn’t care because the trash is properly buried, and he believes in landfill mining when the technology is there. Basically, in 10-20-30 years, they will mine the trash for gold, copper, and other precious metals left in old electronics that didn’t get recycled. It’s debated, landfill mining in general, but he is a dreamer who clearly gives zero f—s about local laws, and for that, all I can say: cheers!

Now, until this, this is a great management story, nothing to do with you visiting a town in Tuscany. But, as said above, the landfill paid millions to the town, and it is still paying millions. So, as a mayor, what would you do with all that money? Of course, first you'd renovate the entire village, lower local taxes to almost nothing, and make sure all services are spot on. The town is small, it has only about 5,000 people. But once you have made the town nice and tidy, what then?

You pay for the giants. Yes. Giants.

I can’t even guess what has crossed the minds of the locals. Truth is, there was a dinosaur park with giant dinos in the woods near the village. It brought in some revenue and drew visitors. Maybe that is where the idea came from? The manufacturing company of the giants is a local art company, maybe they did the dinos as well? I don’t know. Doesn’t matter.

Long story short, the town spent a fortune on creating giant sculptures. First, they created them in the landfill itself. Then they built an amphitheater with giants, which now serves as an event space. Then they built an airwalk lookout that is huge compared to the village, and from there, you can look down at the valley and the giants. The first giant is more than 15 years old, but the town hasn’t given up on them, the latest one is crawling out of an old house in Fabbrica, one of Peccioli’s little hamlets, a short drive from the town.

The giants brought in visitors. The town then invested even more in public art. Now Peccioli looks like a public art festival. After 15 years since the first giant crawled out of the landfill, the town won a contest in Italy for the “Village of the villages,” where they find the best town in Italy. They took the title away from Ronciglione, by the way, which was my first inspiration for this publication. We found the town online, since the giants are highly photogenic, many people come there and take pretty insane pictures. We’re used to this in Pietrasanta. It’s the same here: a medieval village with old stone buildings, and then a public modern art piece in the main piazza, carved from marble. The contrast between the two is astonishing. We even have a Roman-style non-functioning church as an art exhibition space. Peccioli did the same, combining their medieval hilltop town with modern art, but they applied this concept to the Tuscan landscape. The giants are mainly crawling on the slopes around the town, not inside the town, where there is no space for them.

In the town, the art is in separate pieces. Mirrors on buildings that reflect your visions onto you. Entire buildings decorated with eyeballs, citizens looking at you while you walk into the old town. Sometimes they have laser shows or visual art performances. The airwalk and the road to it are an art exhibition in themselves. And don’t forget, before art, the town spent the trash money to fully renovate the entire village. The town is in impeccable condition, fully preserved.

And this is the thing. This is why the entire story is genius. If you come here, you are looking for that Tuscan hilltop town experience. Medieval old town, ideally with walls, a big church, a piazza, cafes and bars around it, tranquility, and the Tuscan landscape. Most people get this experience from tour operators, visiting Disneyland towns like Montepulciano, San Gimignano, or Volterra. There's nothing local there, or very little is left. But what if you are not in one of those highly popular towns? I live here, I can tell you that the hilltop town experience has around 100 more applicants. Almost all towns here look like this. It’s nowhere near as unique or special. So how can you stand out?

I don’t know how much money the town makes from tourism. But for a town with only 5,000 people, it has quite a lot of bars and restaurants. We had a really nice steak at Ristorante Ferretti, right on the main square, and washed it down with a glass of something at the bar called La Terrazza, which, as its name suggests, has a large terrace overlooking the same valley you can see from the airwalk.

If you have kids, the dino park is fun. But I would end the day at Montecchio, a small hamlet on the hill in front of Peccioli. Administratively, it belongs to Peccioli, so they are the same town. Montecchio has an old church and maybe two streets in a very old, almost empty borgo. It’s amazing during the golden hours, and it offers the same panoramic views of the valley, just from a different direction, facing west, so it's perfect for watching the sunset.

Standing out is relative. In Tuscany, almost all villages and towns look beautiful. Especially if you are coming from a not-so-inspiring environment, like a classic American suburb. Some are unique in their own way, like San Gimignano, which has preserved medieval skyscrapers. Others are unique because they are on a route, the roads of Val d’Orcia, that are visited by everyone.

Others have giants crawling out from landfills, reminding you that dreaming big sometimes pays off in decades. But it pays off.

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Before we jump into this, two confessions. First, this article won’t feature our own photos, since both of these towns are mostly about the Etruscan cemeteries, and the official pictures are way better than any of ours. Second, though I’ve already told you about the cemeteries and the towns, this article won’t really be about them or their funeral grounds.

So what is this article about, then, you may ask, rightly so? Etruscans. Mostly. But I will reference the towns and other ones as well. Also a lot about Rome. Gladiators. Religion. I’ve studied history, but this is not a history blog, it’s a travel one, so I have to keep some connections to today’s world. The cemeteries of Tarquinia and Cerveteri are landmarks and sights of their own, and if you are anything close to interested in ancient history, if you enjoyed the Pyramids or the Acropolis, this is the Italian version of them outside of the Roman Forum and the Colosseum. Though both the Forum and the Colosseum have Etruscan heritage. But more on that later.

So let’s begin our journey at Viterbo. We’ve driven from Viterbo to Rome, and there are two options: go inland through the lakes, or go by the coast. We visited these towns during this trip, plus as day trips from Rome to Cerveteri. The coastal road to Rome is not rocky, there is no drama like in Amalfi or in Liguria. It’s a plain coast, mostly, with, to be honest, kinda boring seaside towns. Almost no tourists, no one goes to these towns for a holiday, except Italians, mostly from Rome. But some of the old Etruscan cities are here, at least whatever is left of them.

Before we talk about the towns, let’s answer the basic question in the title: who the hell are the Etruscans? I’ll give you the TLDR version.

By 700 BC, they were big on three things:

Trading with all these new neighbors. Especially through their coastal towns like Cerveteri (called Caisra). The Etruscans became rich enough to build many of their cities.

Water and architecture. The drains, the tunnels, the sewers, the arches, all that you think were Roman? The Etruscans made them, and the Romans adopted them later. They drained the marshes and cut water tunnels through the tuff of Etruria, their land. The name Tuscany comes from them. So does Tuscia.

Religion and funerals. More on this below.

Campanilismo is one of the most important things in Italy. It comes from the idea of minding whatever is close to your village’s bell tower, and nothing else. It comes from Italy’s city-state heritage. Not medieval, not even Roman, but Etruscan. Well, the city-state is the original form of civilization anyway, but in Italy, the Etruscans did it first.

Their cities were independent, and their leaders met once a year at a shared sanctuary to coordinate trade and religion. The cities were so independent that they couldn’t care less if one of them was attacked. They had no military coordination and no national alignment. The only thing they shared was their religion. Which was quite odd.

We know more about their religion than we know about anything else. Why? They thought their lives were set by the Gods, already decided and planned out, so why bother? So they built their houses from wood and mudbrick, but they built their cemeteries from stone. Wooden houses, stone tombs. Which is why almost anything that has survived from their civilization can be found in their graves, literally. There are some arches and city walls that have survived, like the arch in Volterra, but mostly, nothing, only their cemeteries. And we know the religion itself because the Romans copied their books and kept their priests on the payroll for five centuries after the last Etruscan city fell.

Cerveteri and Tarquinia (Etruscan names: Caisra and Tarchna) have these Etruscan necropolises, burial grounds. They were among their biggest cities, with tens of thousands of people and immense wealth, as they were trading centers, but nothing was left, only the cemeteries. This is also true of Veii, the Etruscan city closest to Rome, or any of the others. Nothing remained, except burial grounds, because those were carved into stone. So, if you want to see or learn about them, the best place to start is either Cerveteri or Tarquinia and their necropolis. The museums around them are pretty amazing.

Two distinctive things make these burial grounds interesting.

One is the women. Yeah, you wouldn’t have guessed it, right? Now, I wouldn’t say with a straight face that the original feminists were Etruscans, but only in their culture do you see women right next to men. How do others illustrate women? As caretakers of children or men, or as muses for arts and entertainment. Traditional stereotypes. For the Etruscans, women were shown equal to men. They ate with the men, on the same couch. They had their own names, and their mother’s family name on the tomb next to the father’s. They could write, socialize, and even rule. They could accumulate wealth, carry their family lineage, and own property. Remember, that wasn’t possible for a married woman in England until the late 19th century, let alone in other civilizations at the time. A woman in Athens wasn’t even allowed to leave the house unless she had a good reason.

Two is the timeline. These cemeteries carry hundreds of years. Etruscans believed that everything is already set by the Gods, as I explained above. This was true for their own lives, their cities’ lives, and also their entire civilization’s lineage. In fact, they gave their own civilization ten ages. At the end of the tenth, it stops existing. An age lasted as long as the longest life born at its start, and when that person died, the Gods sent a sign to close it, and the priests read it. The cemeteries capture several of these ages. By the time Rome becomes a thing (753 BC), the Etruscans are only around their second or third.

So the early paintings in these cemeteries are cheerful, happy, warm, and full of life. People are shown entertaining, having fun, being together. In the later ones, you see demons with weapons, winged women, and people being led together to some dark place. Everything turns dark, gloomy, pessimistic.

Thanks to Rome. During these times, Rome starts expanding from the hills next to the Tiber. Everything starts to stick together: their loose network of city-states, their fatalist religion, their lack of a unified military, and the last ages of their civilization. Rome conquered Etruscan cities one by one. Rome besieged Veii for ten years. Every year, Veii’s leaders went to the shared sanctuary and asked the other cities for help. Every year, the other cities said no. Veii fell to Rome. By the end, Rome had conquered all of their cities and assimilated their people. And here is the part I love: they got Roman citizenship in 90 BC, and within a generation, their own priests announced that the final age had begun.

So, in a way, the Etruscan fatalistic religion was right: they stopped existing, ending their lineage, because they became Romans. So much so that the last three kings of Rome were Etruscans. And when Rome threw the last one out in 509 BC and called itself a Republic, the Etruscan cities were doing the same thing at home, replacing kings with elected magistrates. Even the census and the class system Rome ran on for centuries came from the second Etruscan king.

Oh, and lastly, those gladiator games? They started as funeral games, to honor the dead by spilling blood on the ground. The Romans took them from the Etruscans and turned them into a circus. Also, the Roman toga? The Roman arches? The Roman sewers? Even Mussolini’s famous fascist symbol, the Roman fasces? All of these were originally Etruscan.

All the cities you visit nowadays, Bologna, Modena, Perugia, Arezzo, Volterra, Cortona, Orvieto, Chiusi, and so on, are Etruscan cities at their foundations. Even people in present-day Tuscany still carry Etruscan genes from ancestors absorbed by the Romans, who adopted Latin yet still grow the same olive trees above their cities’ burial grounds.

And, just to upset the French, because that is always fun, French wine is Etruscan. They shipped wine and vines to the coast of Gaul, and that’s the oldest winemaking evidence in France. You are welcome, Frenchies, cheers from Lattara.

Hi, I’m Peter, and you’re reading Anywhere Italy. Our mission is to cover the 1,000 Italian towns most travelers skip, in person, one at a time. Come along for free, or pay to keep us on the road.

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Hi, I’m Peter, and you’re reading Anywhere Italy. Our mission is to cover the 1,000 Italian towns most travelers skip, in person, one at a time. Come along for free, or pay to keep us on the road.

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Hi, I’m Peter, and you’re reading Anywhere Italy. Our mission is to cover the 1,000 Italian towns most travelers skip, in person, one at a time. Come along for free, or pay to keep us on the road.

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Hi, I’m Peter, and you’re reading Anywhere Italy. Our mission is to cover the 1,000 Italian towns most travelers skip, in person, one at a time. Come along for free, or pay to keep us on the road.

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Hi, I’m Peter, and you’re reading Anywhere Italy.

Our mission is to cover the 1,000 Italian towns most travelers skip, in person, one at a time. Come along for free, or pay to keep us on the road.

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Hi, I’m Peter, and you’re reading Anywhere Italy. Our mission is to cover the 1,000 Italian towns most travelers skip, in person, one at a time. Come along for free, or pay to keep us on the road.

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