Discover Tuscany’s Blog: exploring Tuscany and all its hidden corners…

Tuscany is preparing to celebrate the Carnival with many amusing events organized in next weeks in the main cities as well in the tiny villages of the region.
From the great and famous Carnival parades in Viareggio to the events in smaller towns, such as the Carnival at Mugello in Dicomano or San Gimignano, there are a lot of funny and colorful appointments for both adults and children.

Viareggio and its famous allegoric floats

Viareggio offers one of the most famous Carnival parade in Italy. Its allegorical floats in paper mache animate every year the seaside avenues of the city, well known as “La Passeggiata”.
On Saturday 19 a cerimony will officially open this Viareggio Carnival 2011. The real parades will take place around 3 pm on Sunday 20 and 27 of February, March 6 (Sunday) and Thursday 8. The final parade on March 13 will start at 5pm. The events required entry tickets.The Viareggio Carnival is really a funny (a bit crowded) event, enjoy a short video of one of its past masked parade.

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Lunigiana is the Land of Castles: this is the Castle of Malgrate

Even if we’ve been exploring Tuscany for years now, both for work and pleasure (overall for pleasure ), we still had never visited the area called Lunigiana at the very far northwestern edge of Tuscany.
We set out to change this last week, taking a week’s vacation and staying near Aulla at the Convivium Pow Wow Lunae farmhouse.

We are organizing our photos and notes about the trip to be able to tell you more about what we saw but in the meantime I wanted to share our first impressions.

The Lunigiana is the furthest corner of Tuscany, in the northwest almost in the Liguria region: a Tuscan can right away hear the regional accent giving way to the closer coastal area’s way of speech
Even if it isn’t the most popular in terms of visitors, Lunigiana has a bit of everything: the splendid Apuan Alps shared with the Garfagnana valley; the sea, from the Versilia to the Cinque Terre; over 100 castles with their villages sitting atop the hills; excellent local food products and a richness from the historical point of view that surprised us.

Read more and start Discovering Lunigiana

Greetings! Today we are in Garfagnana, a wonderful green area in northern Tuscany near Lucca that we were planning to visit for some time now. Our plan is to stay three-four days and do some hiking (Garfagnana is one of the best places in Tuscany if you like to walk up mountains!) and visit some of its small towns. We are staying in Gallicano, at the Bed and Breakfast Eliseo which is a very nice family-run small hotel right in the center of the town. We didn’t have a chance yet to visit Gallicano properly, today is the town’s yearly festival celebrating the patron saint of San Jacopo and everyone was busy with bringing together last minute details and preparing the parade floats, and the streets were closed to cars. We spent the afternoon visiting the Grotta del Vento (Wind Cave) a really interesting carsic cave not far from Gallicano, about 11 km. The cave is covered by extraordinary formations like stalactites and stalagmites, and you can admire underground streams and huge caverns. The calcaric formations are elaborate and grand, standing in the first part of the cave you have the impression of being in a natural cathedral. The managers of the cave were very kind in giving us a lot of printed informational guides, so will certainly write about it as we learn more as well as returning to visit again soon!

Read more about our first day in Garfagnana »