Every beach in Tuscany has a view of a wall. This is the book about what is behind it.

Stand on the sand at Marina di Pietrasanta and turn your back on the sea, and there is a range of grey mountains rising straight out of the plain, streaked white in July and white in January. One white is marble, the other is snow. Behind that wall are two valleys, a river, a handful of small capitals, and a couple of hundred villages built on rock spurs by people who did not expect anyone to visit. Almost nobody does.

The road starts at Lucca, the city you cannot photograph, which bought its way out of every century and still has the receipts. It climbs the Serchio past a bridge the Devil finished and a chain bridge that is Budapest in miniature, into the Garfagnana: Barga with its Scottish accent, Castelnuovo and the poet who hated governing it, the blood salami and the chestnut and the porcini sold by the kilo on the roadside. Then over the pass into the Lunigiana, where the author and his wife lived for two months in a village of eighty people, most of them over eighty, and ate the best meal of their lives in a room with no menu in English. Then Carrara and the white mountain from behind, and the village above it that cures fat in marble. And finally Luni, the Roman city that named the whole region, an amphitheatre in a field with nobody in it.

In every valley, the author's own tables: the panigacci dinner, the boar stew, the bar with the small glass at the end that is not on the bill. Plus what to eat, when to come, and why the mountain never gives anything for free.

Every place in this book is a place the author has been. Every restaurant is one he has eaten in. Empty is acceptable. Wrong is not.

Book 3 in the Anywhere Italy series, from the writers of the Sunday letter about the thousand Italian towns most travelers skip.