Most people arrive in Tuscany on a budget flight with just a few days to spend. And they’re always offered the same two choices: the art cities — Pisa, Lucca, Siena, Florence — or a farmhouse with a pool, or a beach on the coast.
You came for the Tuscany of A Room with a View. It’s real, and it’s worth it. But twenty minutes from Pisa airport, between the Leaning Tower and the hills of Florence, there’s a third Tuscany that almost no guidebook mentions.
It’s a land of walled villages and Romanesque churches, of wine cellars dug into the rock and olive groves the tour buses never reach. It’s also where you’ll find the unexpected: a village that funds world-class contemporary art, an open-air theatre that becomes a lake each summer, a dinosaur park older than Jurassic Park.
If you’re already here, or still planning your trip — take a look around. There’s more than you’d imagine.