Hidden Gems in Northern Tuscany: Secret Villages Near Bagni di Lucca

There is a Tuscany that every visitor knows: the cypress avenues of the Val d'Orcia, the wine estates of Chianti, the golden hills of Siena. It is beautiful, and for good reason it draws millions of people each year. But it is not all of Tuscany — not even most of it.

North of Lucca, the landscape changes completely. The gentle, open hills of the south give way to mountains: steep, forested, cut through with deep river valleys and hidden gorges. The Garfagnana and the Val di Lima are among the least visited regions in the country. Their medieval villages — dozens of them, clinging to hillsides or tucked into valleys — receive a fraction of the visitors that descend on San Gimignano or Montepulciano. The roads to them are narrow and winding. The signposting, in places, is optimistic.

This is precisely what makes them worth seeking out.

Bagni di Lucca sits at the threshold of this northern world, making it the natural base from which to explore it. Within an hour's drive in almost any direction, a landscape opens up that feels genuinely untouched: not preserved for tourists, but simply alive, on its own terms, in the way places only are when they have not yet been discovered.

Montefegatesi — Where Dante Spent the Winter

Perched at 842 metres above the valley floor, Montefegatesi is among the most dramatically positioned villages in the entire commune of Bagni di Lucca. The approach by road is an experience in itself: the valley drops away below as the lane climbs through chestnut forest, and the village appears suddenly on its hilltop with the inevitability of something that has always been exactly there.

Montefegatesi is old in the way that mountain villages are old — first mentioned in documents from the 10th century, its medieval street plan virtually intact, its stone houses arranged along lanes so narrow that two people cannot pass without turning sideways. A statue of Dante stands at the village's highest point: local tradition holds that the poet stayed here during one of his exiles and wrote part of the Inferno inspired by the winters he spent in the mountains. Whether or not this is historically verifiable, it is easy, standing on a grey November morning above the fog-filled valley, to understand the impulse.

In the 19th century, remarkably, Montefegatesi was something of a gathering place for Italian libertines — intellectuals and freethinkers who found in its remoteness a useful distance from the world below. The village has also shaped the nearby hiking trail network: the Alta Via dei Pastori and the Sentiero degli Avi both begin here, making it the starting point for two of the finest mountain walks in the Apennines.

Drive time from Bagni di Lucca: 20 minutes. Best visited in autumn, when the surrounding forest is in full colour.

Lucchio — The Village on the Rock

If Montefegatesi commands its hilltop with authority, Lucchio does something more audacious: it clings to the sheer face of a cliff above the Lima valley as if defying gravity itself, the ruins of a medieval castle visible on the outcrop above, the valley a precipitous drop below.

The village is tiny — perhaps a handful of permanent residents — and the access road is not for the faint-hearted. But the reward is a place of extraordinary character: stone houses built into the rock face, terraced gardens on improbable gradients, and views that take in the full breadth of the Val di Lima from a height that makes the river below look like a silver thread.

The castle ruin at the top offers the finest panoramic position in the valley. On clear days the Ligurian coast is visible to the northwest, and the Apuan Alps rise in their marble brilliance to the west.

Not suitable for caravans or vehicles with low ground clearance. Allow a full afternoon.

San Cassiano di Controne — Ancient Church, Trailhead and Silence

Less dramatic than Lucchio and less famous than Montefegatesi, San Cassiano is perhaps the purest expression of what makes the villages above Bagni di Lucca worth visiting: a place of complete quiet, surrounded by mountains, with a church that dates to the year 772 and a setting that asks for nothing more than a slow walk and a long gaze.

The church of San Cassiano is one of the oldest surviving buildings in the entire commune — over 1,250 years old at time of writing. The village sits at the trailhead of the Alta Via dei Pastori, the route to Monte Prato Fiorito, and the combination of ancient architecture and immediate mountain access makes it a natural starting point for a morning in the hills.

Combined well with: the Monte Prato Fiorito hike, or a lunch at Bar Santina in the hills above toward Palleggio.

Barga — The Most Scottish Town in Italy

About 30 minutes north of Bagni di Lucca, following the Serchio valley toward the Garfagnana, Barga is one of those places that confounds every expectation of what a Tuscan town should be — and is all the more remarkable for it.

The historic centre sits on a hilltop at 410 metres, its cobbled lanes and medieval walls commanding views over the Serchio valley and the Apuan Alps that are, on a clear morning, simply extraordinary. The Romanesque Cathedral of San Cristoforo at the summit is one of the finest churches in the province of Lucca, its pale stone facade and single campanile visible from the valley below. Giovanni Pascoli, the poet, lived four kilometres away in Castelvecchio and wrote about hearing the cathedral bells from his study — the bell tower appears in his poetry as an emblem of home.

But Barga has a second identity, one that no other Tuscan hill town shares: it is, improbably, a Scottish town. The story begins in the late 19th century, when the decline of the silk industry forced the town's young people to emigrate. Many ended up in Scotland — Glasgow, Edinburgh, East Lothian — where they opened cafes, restaurants and ice cream shops. The migration continued, intermittently, for a century. Today, between 40 and 60% of Barga's residents can claim Scottish relatives. The town is twinned with Prestonpans and other East Lothian communities. A red British telephone box, repurposed as a book exchange and dubbed "the smallest library in Tuscany," stands in the town centre. In late July and August, the Barga Jazz Festival transforms the medieval streets into an outdoor concert venue of unusual beauty.

The musician Paolo Nutini is among the most famous Scottish descendants of Barga — and occasionally performs in the region when visiting his ancestral town.

Drive time: 30 minutes from Bagni di Lucca. Best in summer (jazz festival) or autumn.

Coreglia Antelminelli — The Village of Plaster Figurines

The name alone is worth the detour: Coreglia Antelminelli was named after Castruccio Castracani, the great Lucchese warlord of the 14th century, who granted the village to the Antelminelli family. The village sits in a panoramic position above the Serchio valley, its medieval walls intact, its cobbled streets arriving unexpectedly at viewpoints that leave the visitor wordless.

The piazza just before the town walls offers a valley-wide view that will leave you without words. But Coreglia's most distinctive claim is its Museum of Plaster Figurines and Emigration — a collection of over 800 plaster models that document the extraordinary trade practised by the village's inhabitants for centuries: the making and selling of decorative plaster figurines, carried across Europe by travelling vendors from Coreglia in a tradition that stretches back to the Renaissance. The museum is a genuinely singular place, equal parts folk art and social history.

In August, the festival Una Notte nell'Antico Borgo recreates a medieval evening in the historic centre — one of the most atmospheric local events in northern Tuscany.

Drive time: 25 minutes from Bagni di Lucca. Combined well with a visit to Barga.

Borgo a Mozzano and the Devil's Bridge

Fourteen kilometres south of Bagni di Lucca, at the point where the Lima joins the Serchio, the village of Borgo a Mozzano guards one of the great pieces of medieval engineering in Tuscany: the Ponte della Maddalena, better known as the Ponte del Diavolo — the Devil's Bridge.

The bridge was constructed in the 11th century, attributed to the patronage of Countess Matilde di Canossa, and its single great arch — dramatically high and steeply humped above the Serchio — is a feat of structural ambition that provoked medieval onlookers into the obvious conclusion: only a pact with the devil could have produced it. The legend holds that the architect, unable to complete the bridge in time, made exactly such a pact — and that the devil was subsequently outwitted by a local pig driven across the bridge before the architect himself, thereby fulfilling the terms of the contract.

At dusk, when the river reflects the arch and the last light catches the stone, the bridge earns its superstitious name without any help from legend.

Borgo a Mozzano also holds a different kind of distinction: its Halloween festival, when the town leans fully into its Gothic reputation and the streets fill with an energy quite unlike anything else in the Garfagnana.

Drive time: 15 minutes south of Bagni di Lucca. The bridge is most atmospheric at dawn or dusk.

The Ghost Village of Fabbriche di Careggine

An hour's drive north into the Garfagnana brings one of the strangest and most melancholy sights in all of Tuscany: a medieval village submerged beneath a lake.

When the hydroelectric dam at Vagli di Sotto was constructed in the 1940s, the valley below was flooded and the village of Fabbriche di Careggine — inhabited since the Middle Ages — disappeared beneath the waters of what is now the Lago di Vagli. The lake has been drained four times since the dam was built, most recently in 1994, and on each occasion the rooftops, walls, church tower and street plan of the drowned village emerge from the water, intact and ghostly, drawing crowds from across Tuscany.

The next planned draining remains uncertain — the process is technically complex and expensive — but the lake itself, set in the fold of two mountain slopes above the Serchio valley, is beautiful in its own right. The water takes on an extraordinary turquoise-green colour in clear weather, and the surrounding mountains have the scale and severity of the Alps.

Drive time: approximately 1 hour north from Bagni di Lucca. A full half-day excursion.