Our week of vacation in Lunigiana, Toscana

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

Today we got up early to head off into the Apuan Alps and do some hiking up to Monte Forato, an extraordinary natural arch formed at the top of a mountain that makes it seem like a hole was made at its peak. On clear days, the hole in the mountain can be seen from the Serchio valley, especially when the sun is setting behind the mountain range .

We started off from Fornovolasco, a small medieval village at the foot of the mountain. The day was sunny and a bit warm, it was a good climb up to the peak… and then all of a sudden, as we were starting off from Monte Forato along the crest, a summer thunderstorm rolled out of the north! With lightning and thunder over our heads, we headed back down very carefully but could not avoid getting a good soak – it was quite an adventure! We’ll write more about our hike as soon as we can, letting you know what paths we took and posting some pictures in case you’re interested in trying it yourself.

That’s all for now, we are quite tired and are sure to rest well tonight .