Massa Marittima

We came to Massa Marittima mostly to break up the drive between Siena and the coast, and ended up staying an extra night, which wasn’t the plan. It sits inland in the Maremma, up on a ridge that made it a mining town for centuries — silver, copper, and later pyrite, pulled out of these hills from Etruscan times right through to the twentieth century — and that industrial history gives it a different texture than the wine towns further north. Less manicured, a bit more weathered, streets that feel worked rather than staged.

The Duomo di San Cerbone dominates the upper town, and it’s a genuinely strange, wonderful building — Romanesque at the base, with a Gothic upper section grafted on at an angle, sitting slightly askew at the top of a travertine staircase in a piazza that slopes downhill on one side. We arrived close to sunset and had the steps almost entirely to ourselves, which after two weeks of shuffling through crowds in Siena and San Gimignano felt like we’d found a loophole. The stone catches the evening light in a way that made Lia make me wait twenty extra minutes just to photograph it properly.

What I didn’t expect was the Museo delle Miniere, the old mine museum, which takes you down into actual tunnels dug for a mid-century training mine beneath the town — hard hats, dripping stone, narrow galleries lit just enough to see the drilling equipment left in place. It’s a completely different Tuscany experience from vineyard tours and fresco cycles, and it explained a lot about why the town feels the way it does above ground: this was working-class mining territory long before it was anyone’s holiday destination.

We happened to overlap with preparations for the Balestro del Girifalco, the crossbow competition the town holds twice a year in medieval costume, and watched a rehearsal in the piazza — men in fifteenth-century dress practicing formations with genuine seriousness, no tourists watching but us. We ate cinghiale stew that night at a small trattoria off Via Moncini, the wild boar rich enough that I couldn’t finish it, and slept better than we had anywhere else on the trip, mostly because there was no traffic noise at all.

When to go: May or August for the Balestro del Girifalco crossbow tournament, or September for warm weather without the peak-summer heat that bakes the Maremma inland.