Garfagnana

Nobody we mentioned Garfagnana to in Florence seemed to have actually been there, which should have told us something. It’s the valley of the Serchio river, wedged between the Apuan Alps and the main Apennine ridge north of Lucca, and it looks almost nothing like the Tuscany of the postcards — no rolling gold hills, no cypress-lined drives, just steep forested slopes, stone villages clinging to ledges, and roads that switchback so tightly Lia had to stop reading the map out loud because it was making her carsick.

We based ourselves near Castelnuovo di Garfagnana, the valley’s main town, with its Rocca fortress overlooking the river and a genuinely good Thursday market where we bought a bag of dried chestnuts and a wheel of pecorino from a farmer who talked us through his whole flock’s grazing schedule unprompted. Chestnuts are the thing here — this used to be subsistence food for the mountain villages, ground into flour when wheat wouldn’t grow at altitude, and you still see it everywhere, in castagnaccio cake and necci crepes and farro soups thickened with chestnut flour instead of grain.

One afternoon we drove up toward the Apuan Alps side, chasing a sign for a marble quarry viewpoint, and ended up on a road that felt genuinely industrial — trucks hauling raw blocks of white marble down from cuts in the mountainside, the same stone Michelangelo supposedly came up here himself to select for his sculptures. It’s a strange thing to see, this brutal open-pit scarring on peaks that from a distance look snow-capped but are actually just marble dust and bare rock. We didn’t get close to Carrara proper, that’s technically over the ridge, but the quarrying culture bleeds into this whole corner of the range.

We hiked a short stretch near the Orecchiella nature park, cool and quiet under beech and chestnut canopy, and stopped for lunch in a village so small the only restaurant doubled as the general store — the owner walked off mid-conversation to sell someone a bag of flour, then came back and finished describing the tordelli filling like nothing had happened. It’s the kind of place that makes the rest of Tuscany feel, in retrospect, a bit crowded.

When to go: Late September to October for chestnut season and the harvest festivals in the villages, or July for cooler mountain hiking away from the coastal heat.