Tuscany’s Shoreline is Italy’s Greatest-Saved Secret

What image springs to thoughts if you hear the phrase Tuscany? I’m going to take of venture that it entails at the least one of many following: A rustic villa or trattoria. Vineyards or olive groves and the liquids they produce. Cypress timber marching in single file up the facet of a hill. Michelangelo’s David. 

Cocktails on the beach? Not a lot.

Operating up the thigh of Italy for about 250 miles, the Tuscan coast appears to one way or the other float freed from its mom area—and the associations it evokes. As if lazy days on a ship and spaghetti with clams have been one way or the other un-Tuscan. It doesn’t assist that among the space’s seaside resorts don’t precisely ooze native character. Forte dei Marmi is a seaside village that was changed into a Tuscan Hamptons by well-heeled Florentines (who name it “Forte”). Viareggio, one of many first cities in Italy to service the style for sea bathing within the nineteenth century, is as we speak a household resort residing on Belle Époque reminiscences.

However one a part of Tuscany-by-the-Sea remains to be profoundly Tuscan and nonetheless manages to embrace the newcomers with out promoting its soul. This taking place place doesn’t have a single title, or a single id. Located on the southernmost finish of the area’s shoreline, it’s made up of three adjoining areas. Every has its personal habitués, its personal attraction, its personal scene: Giglio Island; the Monte Argentario peninsula; and an extended stretch of seaside, dune, and rural hinterland that facilities on a cute hill city referred to as Capalbio. 

When Mediterranean villa rental specialist Huw Beaugié of the Thinking Traveller visited Argentario and Capalbio on a reconnaissance journey within the spring of 2023, he was impressed. Not simply by the homes, however by the individuals who have been heading there and the sense that this was a vacation spot that’s “at first of one thing,” he instructed me. “It felt very very like Puglia in 2009.”

The inland a part of this stretch, referred to as La Maremma, was as soon as a marshy swamp the place malaria was rife and butteri—Tuscan cowboys—wrangled herds of long-horned cattle. The marshes have been drained, in levels, between 1829 and the Nineteen Fifties, however this remained a distant, sparsely populated place of scattered villages, boar looking, and driftwood seashores. A wild, rocky peninsula with hardly any sandy seashores and loads of rutted gravel roads, Argentario was frequented principally by yacht homeowners and mountain bikers. As for Giglio, the specter of pirate raids prompted its inhabitants to show away from the ocean for hundreds of years, taking refuge within the fortified city excessive within the island’s heart. When vacationers started to reach within the Nineteen Fifties and 60s, they have been overwhelmingly Italian.

True, Argentario’s legendary Il Pellicano lodge, based in 1965 by a dashing British aviator and his American spouse, has all the time attracted a complicated world clientele. However this pleasant retreat, with its seaside nation membership really feel, could be very a lot a vacation spot resort: most visitors go there to be at Il Pellicano, to not tour the world. One other forerunner of as we speak’s scene is Ansedonia, a hillside neighborhood of upscale properties close to Capalbio that within the Nineteen Sixties grew to become fashionable with inventive varieties from the Italian capital.

Each Ansedonia and Il Pellicano are primarily luxurious enclaves. There’s nonetheless loads of mileage in that fashion of trip. However the burgeoning southern Tuscan seaside scene is extra open and permeable. It’s piloted, at the least partially, by a brand new breed of curious guests who don’t have any want to be confined to a gated resort or villa.

Exploring Monte Argentario

Peter Pan’s Neverland was translated as l’isola che non c’è within the Italian model of the kids’s traditional—actually “the island that isn’t.” That’s a fairly good description of Monte Argentario, which behaves like an island in each respect, and possibly was one 1000’s of years in the past, earlier than it grew to become tethered to the Tuscan mainland by two sandy isthmuses.

Once I first visited, within the mid Eighties, Susanna Agnelli had simply completed a 10-year stint because the almost-island’s mayor (the Agnellis, who based the Fiat firm, are the equal of a royal household in Italy). However regardless of this tony stamp of approval, Argentario was, exterior of one small marina, nonetheless a spot of journey. I bear in mind wild scrambles right down to rocky coves, the place my spouse and I might unwrap a picnic assembled from an alimentari (grocery). 

From 1557 to 1707, this nook of Tuscany was a Spanish garrison. It was Orbetello that benefited most from the Iberian contact. Surrounded and guarded by the lagoon that separates Argentario from the mainland, this amiable city looks like Madrid’s little Tuscan twin, with its sunny disposition, effectively developed café tradition, and homes in each shade of ocher.

Argentario itself, nonetheless, was in these years a spot of forts and garrisons, with a small civilian inhabitants concentrated in two small harbor cities, Porto Ercole and Porto Santo Stefano. The remaining was principally left to the goats. If that is Tuscany’s Amalfi Coast, it’s nonetheless in some respects the Amalfi Coast of its pioneer years. Even as we speak, it’s not possible to finish the coastal loop of the peninsula in a automotive with out driving among the manner on a slim gravel street.

With its marinas, waterfront bars and eating places, and excessive cashmere sweater depend, Porto Ercole doesn’t make a lot of a residing from fishing anymore (salty Porto Santo Stefano, on the opposite facet of the peninsula, has a better declare to that). However neither is it—like fairly Portofino, on the Ligurian coast—a kind of locations the place the Milanese ultrarich go to play at being fisherfolk. As a substitute of a row of cookie-cutter high-end style boutiques, you’ll discover scuba diving facilities, gelaterie, and an uncommon vacationer attraction: La Grotta dei Pirati, a cave the place Porto Ercole celebrates a giant fiesta, La Notte dei Pirati, in Might. Just about your complete city goes full Jack Sparrow, dressing up in pirate costumes and waving picket swords to commemorate and exorcise the trauma of a time when assaults by the formidable Hayreddin Barbarossa, a.ok.a. Redbeard, and his colleagues have been an actual and current hazard.

It was this sense of neighborhood—mixed with the apparent scenic charms—that first attracted the household of Swedish entrepreneur Conni Jonsson to the world. After summering in Porto Ercole for a number of years, Jonsson purchased the city’s disused Cirio sardine-canning manufacturing facility in 2017. An industrial relic, it’s being reimagined as a resort with a give attention to wellness and culinary excellence. It’s not resulting from be completed for a number of years, however Jonsson’s second Porto Ercole funding has had a a lot sooner path to completion. A modest lodge overlooking the harbor—the form of place locals would go to for weddings and christenings—was reopened in August 2023 as La Roqqa following a top-to-toe overhaul. 

La Roqqa does one thing new for Monte Argentario. It’s very a lot a lodge, not a resort, one with a surprisingly city really feel—and it’s embedded in a full of life neighborhood. I walked right down to Alicina sul Porto, a spot by the port the place the seafood is recent and good and the waitstaff dodge Vespas as they create plates of garlicky spaghetti with chili-spiced totani (flying squid) throughout the street to the waterside terrace. These staying on the town, or sleeping on yachts moored within the marina, now simply as usually head within the different route for aperitifs or dinner at Scirocco, La Roqqa’s stylish, scenic rooftop bar-restaurant, which appears, gratifyingly, to be extra thinking about serving up tasty, fantastically offered farm-to-table (or boat-to-table) Tuscan delicacies than in pursuing a Michelin star.

Rooms at La Roqqa are easy, their minimalism tempered by heat pure supplies and a spread of shades that recall clay, cornfields, seaside, and sky. The opulence comes from the ocean view loved by greater than half of the 55 rooms. The others look onto a vertical backyard wall or above it to the slopes of a mountain topped by a Spanish-era fort. However that’s hardly a sacrifice. Barring uncommon dangerous climate, you’re prone to spend many of the day on the lodge’s Isolotto Beach Club, an appetite-building stroll or five-minute shuttle experience away. (The Jonsson household’s Italian hospitality firm, Miramis, additionally owns Torre di Cala Piccola, a cliffside resort on the peninsula’s western coast that already had a loyal multigenerational clientele and Argentario’s greatest sundown views.) 

Mendacity on a solar lounger at Isolotto, sipping a Hugo Spritz whereas taking in a wild view of sea, rocks, spiky shrubs, and the uninhabited islet that offers the seaside membership its title, I noticed that it’s tough to seek out this degree of barefoot stylish in Italy exterior of, say, Capri or the Aeolians. However that’s Argentario for you—the island that isn’t, however form of is.

Subsequent Cease: Giglio Island

On Giglio Island, the wave-smoothed rocks look from a distance like sea mammals petrified whereas tumbling over each other to get to the water. Aptly, there’s basking there in summer season—by intrepid human sunbathers, who drape themselves over these unforgiving boulders nonchalantly, as in the event that they have been feather beds. Above the tidal zone begins a maquis of mastic, myrtle, helichrysum, arbutus, and different aromatic, hardy vegetation, which within the increased, extra distant elements of the island give approach to groves of ilex, eucalyptus, and stone pine.

For a lot of centuries, life right here was as robust because the granite rocks and prickly because the vegetation. In 1544, Barbarossa, a corsair who had risen to turn out to be admiral of the Ottoman navy, raided the island and carried away into slavery nearly a thousand inhabitants—virtually the island’s whole inhabitants. For hundreds of years, the one fortified settlement was Giglio Castello, a city constructed on a excessive ridge with good views of invading ships. Seen from beneath on a day of decreasing clouds, the city can nonetheless appear a forbidding place, although contained in the gates, floral window containers and the traces of laundry that stretch throughout slim lanes like festive banners lighten the fortress temper. 

However for all times, bustle, shade, and a wide selection of locations to eat and drink, you’ll need the seafront city of Giglio Porto, the place the ferry from Porto Santo Stefano, on Monte Argentario, docks after a one-hour crossing. On disembarking, a five-minute trolley trundle alongside the harbor previous gelaterie, swimwear boutiques, wine bars, and pizzerias results in La Guardia, a beforehand modest lodge that has turn out to be Giglio’s new fashion magnet. It was acquired in 2018 by a pair from the world of promoting, Flaminia Pérez del Castillo and Flavio Caprabianca, who reworked this native landmark right into a welcoming 29-room refuge.

Caprabianca’s design scheme, dominated by supplies like weathered wooden, rope, and cork, has given the sunshine and ethereal rooms a beachcomber soul. The couple additionally drafted the chef of their favourite Roman restaurant to create a menu that provides recent twists to Mediterranean classics like gazpacho (theirs comes with anchovies, pickled onions, olives, and toasted almonds). 

For greater than two years, starting in January 2012, the seaward view from the lodge terrace was dominated by the wreck of the Costa Concordia, the cruise ship that ran aground when its captain bungled a sail-by salute and ended up on a submerged reef, ensuing within the demise of 32 passengers and crew. The Gigliesi, because the island’s inhabitants are recognized, so distinguished themselves within the generosity they prolonged to survivors that they have been collectively awarded a medal for civic advantage by the Italian president. Giglio’s rising repute looks like a well-earned turnaround after a setback that was simply the newest in its hardscrabble historical past.

And so to the lighthouse. Nowadays, true luxurious is as a lot about being given the prospect to flee and chill in exceptional environment as it’s about silk sheets and champagne. On Giglio’s wild southernmost headland, Faro Capel Rosso defines the brand new pattern, particularly if you issue within the problem of getting there. Picked up in a battered Fiat in Giglio Castello by the genial Luigi Baffigi, who manned and maintained the lighthouse and its lamps for 37 years earlier than the system was automated in 2012, my spouse and I have been pushed alongside a potholed street previous historical buildings referred to as palmenti. Resembling ruined chapels, these have been used for wine making, as soon as the bedrock of Giglio’s economic system.

The place the street gave up in disgust, Baffigi shouldered my spouse’s rucksack and led us down a rocky path. We have been so intent on not slipping on the unfastened stones that, after we lastly had the leisure to search for, the lighthouse was proper there, with its red-and-white horizontal sweet stripes, as if the outside design scheme had been entrusted to a bunch of four-year-olds.

Inside, all is breezy and marine. The jaunty billiard room, with its nautical décor, units the playful tone for what has turn out to be a four-bedroom retreat that cries out for a gaggle of household or pals, although it additionally capabilities on a by-room foundation. Given the distant location, breakfast and dinner are included within the nightly fee. Each have been ready by Saverio Cristiano, a severe, passionate islander who sources most of what he serves domestically. (A fisherman had introduced him a basket of lobsters the morning we arrived, so it was lobster for dinner, accompanied by greens and herbs from Cristiano’s backyard.)

There’s no pool, however paths beneath the lighthouse descend to 2 swimming coves, one in all which is just about assured to be sheltered from the prevailing wind (the easterly cove additionally has a small touchdown space that permits for arrival by boat, climate allowing). You may bask within the solar or stargaze on the roof beneath the lighthouse’s revolving lantern, or head again up that rocky entry path for a wine tasting at Fontuccia, one of some enterprising producers which have begun to replant the island’s conventional Ansonica vines.

In one in all these spots, chances are you’ll effectively meet one of many three Mura sisters, whose household make ophthalmic devices close to Florence. They gained the precise to run hospitality within the lighthouse till 2036 in an Italian state public sale, which they entered, based on Veronica Mura, “within the spirit of a mad gamble.” That spirit nonetheless pervades a spot of uncommon enchantment, the place visitors are made to really feel like a part of an prolonged household. 

Exploring Capalbio

The practice that chugs alongside the coast from Rome to Capalbio is a sluggish however regular launch from the Everlasting Metropolis’s historic weight and intense city power. First, after a quick glimpse of St. Peter’s dome, come the postwar suburbs, the factories, the automotive showrooms. Sprawling dormitory resorts like Fregene and Ladispoli are up subsequent: seaside cities that double as Rome’s seaside. There’s some reduction, some empty area, as you press on north previous Tarquinia, however not till the practice crosses the border with Tuscany does peace descend.

The practice passes an extended stretch of dunes, fields dotted with grazing cattle, and a lake that, if the avian gods are smiling, could host a blush of flamingoes. Within the distance is the good mass of Monte Argentario, lambent by morning, dramatically backlit at sundown. Seeing the signal capalbio, you descend at a kind of cute rural practice stations made even cuter due to the fairly good bar-trattoria it conceals.

Again within the day, when my spouse and I lived in Rome, we might take our bikes off the train at Capalbio and cycle again alongside the slim street that runs parallel with the railway. Each quarter-mile alongside the street, common as clockwork, stood a fairly white home surrounded by a patch of backyard. Every had an alfresco eating space and a view over the Lago di Burano Nature Reserve wetlands to the road of dunes that separates this coastal idyll from the seaside. Perhaps at some point, we instructed ourselves.

Thirty years later, I used to be sitting within the shade of an historical mulberry tree within the backyard of a kind of homes, which is on the Terre di Sacra property. I was talking with brothers Uberto and Niccolò Resta Pallavicino, who’re half homeowners. In 1919, their grandfather fell in love at first sight with this wild coastal prairie when a practice he was touring on broke down. Three years later, he and a bunch of traders from Milan and Turin based Terre di Sacra. Although a lot lowered by the compelled expropriation that accompanied the top of Italy’s feudal system within the Nineteen Fifties, the property was nonetheless left with a giant chunk of land that stretches for seven miles alongside the coast and consists of 22 of these fascinating white homes, initially constructed to accommodate sharecropper households.

Within the early Nineteen Fifties, Uberto instructed me, few understood the choice of grandpa and his fellow shareholders to hold onto the agriculturally poorer coastal strip when the property was decimated by the Italian authorities’s land-reform invoice. “Right this moment,” he mentioned, “everybody can see how farsighted it was.”

The visitor lodging at present obtainable at Terre di Sacra embrace weekly leases of the homes, a few of which have swimming pools or non-public entry to the seaside; a sensible glamping space with a mixture of tented and picket lodges; and what’s left of the easier campsite that was established within the Nineteen Sixties. A restaurant and seaside membership, La Dogana by Enoteca La Torre, have been constructed within the dunes, and La Macchia—one other membership, this one members-only—is housed in a Sixteenth-century farmhouse and watchtower.

La Macchia’s members include a few of northern Italy’s wealthiest households. However removed from being a playground for the ultra-rich, Terre di Sacra looks like a love story. Way back to 1968, the property ceded administration of simply over a thousand acres of its land, together with the Lago di Burano saltwater lagoon, to the Italian department of the World Wildlife Fund. The group hosts visits to this essential wetland reserve, which is residence to greater than 270 completely different fowl species. It has additionally restored nearly the entire historic properties on the property and a number of other miles of drystone partitions; constructed lengthy hedges to stop wind erosion; and transformed to natural agriculture. It will get 84 % of its power from renewable sources. “This isn’t a style vacation spot,” mentioned Uberto as we watched the solar set over Argentario. “It’s a spot of the soul.” 

A model of this story first appeared within the Might 2025 situation of Journey + Leisure beneath the headline “Tuscany By the Sea.”