Route from La Versiliana to Lido di Camaiore
The Parco della Versiliana stretches between the built-up areas of Forte dei Marmi and Marina di Pietrasanta, the true green lung of the Versilian coast. The Park is a considerable forest heritage able to offer extraordinary natural and environmental richness, from the areas of old dunes where holm oaks and pines grow with a dense, dark undergrowth, to the sunlit clearing where with a little luck you may glimpse the elegant hoopoe. From the evocative Fiumetto ditch, rich in reeds and alive with turtles and moorhens, to the mixed deciduous wood, so varied through the seasons, or the more unexpected half-marshy landscape of the lame, the last left in northern Versilia. The Park is the only trace in Versilia of the ancient Macchia di Marina, a wood of oaks, holm oaks and alders that ran along the coast from Cinquale to Motrone.
In 1785–86, for military needs, the bridge still known today as the «Ponte del Principe» was built over the Fiumetto ditch in honour of the Grand Duke.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, on the sandy soils formed by the retreat of the sea, stone pines were sown and planted to form a windbreak protecting the wood inland. This is the first record of the artificial introduction of the stone, or pine-nut, pine in this area.
During the nineteenth century the counts Digerini Nuti became owners of some portions of land near the mouth of the Fiumetto, creating a large seigneurial estate, and in 1886 they had their manor house built there, named La Versiliana by the writer Renato Fucini, often a guest of the owners. Used above all as a summer residence, the house faced the sea and by the early twentieth century had a landing stage on piles.
In 1906 Gabriele D’Annunzio stayed here. He loved to ride among the sunlit dunes and along the water’s edge, but he also prized the cool, restful landscape just behind the shore, where «the wood is crossed by wide soft avenues along which one gallops without a sound, as in a dream».
Following agreements between the owners and the Municipality of Pietrasanta, from 1951 and for about ten years the first summer performances were held in an open-air theatre set up inside the estate. On 24 June 1980 the estate was bought by the Municipality of Pietrasanta and, by the same act, designated a Public Park. Since then this evocative natural space has hosted the Versiliana Festival every summer and is used for health and recreational activities.
Three itineraries — «Un bosco per noi», «Percorso vita policrosalus» and «Versiliana bike» — allow, each in its own way, an acquaintance with the area and an appreciation of it that respects and safeguards its environmental resources. To spread knowledge of the main features of the Park’s flora and fauna, since 2001 the IterNatura initiative has run each year in July and August: a series of free guided nature walks, open to the wide public of residents and visitors.
At the end of the Parco della Versiliana you cross the district of Fiumetto. The name comes from the river that runs through the area — which can in fact be classed as a small ditch, given its minimal flow. Its history is not very ancient, although the ground on which it stands was a Roman settlement. This zone was the object of clashes, sieges and conquests by Pisa, Florence, Genoa and Lucca. In the eighteenth century Peter Leopold of Habsburg-Lorraine created the Vicariate of Pietrasanta, into which Fiumetto was placed.
After the Napoleonic period, Grand Duke Leopold II began a second work of reclamation on the coastal plain of Fiumetto. In the more inland zone, until the modern and contemporary age, the watercourses and the kind of vegetation made Fiumetto a damp, unhealthy marsh. Thanks to the reclamation the first shrubs began to appear, and from there arose the coastal Mediterranean scrub. The scrub was a vast green expanse of oaks, alders and holm oaks, stretching for about 9 kilometres, from Cinquale to Motrone. The pines were introduced by man at the end of the nineteenth century and were the basis of the newborn pine-nut industry. With the founding of the municipalities, Fiumetto was placed in that of Pietrasanta. The coastal zone is marked, like the surrounding strip, by low sandy shores formed by the accumulation of alluvial sediment and scattered with dunes. That process halted at the end of the nineteenth century for physical and human reasons: the erosion of the coast on the one hand and the building of bathing establishments on the other.
TONFANO
Carrying on we come to Tonfano, originally «Tonfalo», one of the four places into which the district of Marina di Pietrasanta is divided, together with Fiumetto, Le Focette and Motrone. The name comes from the river that ran through the area and was later filled in. The river was fed by the «polle di Vaiana», the springs near Caranna at Forte dei Marmi: from there the Tofalo ran parallel to the present «Fiumetto» that flows through the place of that name, then turned south along what is now Via Tonfano.
Tonfano was, in the nineteenth century, the first of the four places of Marina di Pietrasanta to be settled. The first inhabitants were fishermen, who settled by the river mouth. Later, those who had owned land in the area since the eighteenth century built villas and holiday houses where they came in the summer months to take the sea-bathing cures then in fashion. After the First World War, Tonfano became a seaside resort. During the Second World War the small wooden pier that marked the area was blown up by the Germans, afraid it might serve for unloading goods. Later the American soldiers settled at Villa Rebua and Villa Battelli, from where they could monitor the landings of the small aircraft used for reconnaissance over the Gothic Line. This landing strip was created precisely by filling in the stretch of the Tonfano river that passed through that area. With the river gone, the bridge linking Viale Carducci to Via Versilia, over which the tram line ran, was also destroyed. The territory of Tonfano like that of the neighbouring areas, was originally a marsh. The first reclamation works came in the sixteenth century under Cosimo I, and further reclamation was later carried out under Leopold II. Tonfano’s main attraction is its pier, built for tourism and recreation and opened in 2008. On the pier stand various sculptures, in honour of the artistic vocation of the town of Pietrasanta; it ends in a ten-sided square with a sumptuous fountain at its centre.
Fosso Motrone
South of the district of Tonfano lies the Motrone ditch, which flows into the sea. The Motrone bounds historic Versilia to the south, while to the north it is bounded by the river that crosses Seravezza. Today the whole coastal strip as far as south of Viareggio is called Versilia.
In antiquity it was a harbour at the mouth of the river of Seravezza, called the Fosso delle Prade or Fiumetto, formerly the Old River of Versilia. It was inhabited by the Lombards, and the first certain records of the harbour date from 1084. In 1159 the Lucchese built a stone fortress there, later destroyed by Barbarossa in 1162 at the request of the Pisans. The Lucchese, with Genoese support, rebuilt the fort; in return the Genoese were granted some warehouses in the harbour. Salt arrived at Motrone carried by Genoese ships and destined for the city of Lucca. For almost four centuries the fortress was the object of continual quarrels between Florence, Pisa and Lucca. In 1403 the Florentines obtained from the Lucchese the right to use the Port of Motrone. From then on the most illustrious Florentine merchant families made it a place of flourishing trade; great was the variety of goods landed there, arriving from and departing for the whole Mediterranean and beyond, since the routes reached as far as northern Europe. Following the division of territories under Leo X’s award of 1513, Motrone passed from the Lucchese to the Florentines; to this too is owed the later growth of the town of Viareggio, which had become the only sea outlet of the Republic of Lucca.
The decline of this hub began when Florence decided to develop the port of Livorno, easier to defend by Florentine forces who did not have to cross the malarial zones; while the definitive end of the harbour came with the reclamation works of the seventeenth century across the whole of the plain, with the diversion of canals that raised the harbour bed and brought the final decline of merchant traffic.
The working life of the port of Motrone ended in 1813, when the fortress was destroyed by the English. The stones of the fort were reused for building the Motrone sluices, and today nothing remains of the old fort but a portion of wall built into a house.
Carrying on we come to a club that made the musical and social history of the golden post-war years in Versilia: La Bussola, opened by Sergio Bernardini in June 1955. A man of show business, brilliant and dynamic, from 1948 he had already been successfully running several dance clubs in Viareggio: the Capannina del Marco Polo (where in 1948 the «National Festival of Italian Song» was born, which three years later would move to Sanremo), the Gatto Nero, the Caprice and the Carillon. With his running of La Bussola, Bernardini became a legend. For the opening night he called on Renato Carosone and his famous orchestra. Carosone, like other artists, would stay closely attached to Bernardini’s club.
La Bussola thus became one of the most fashionable clubs in Italy; within a decade almost all the great figures of Italian and international popular music passed across its stage: Louis Armstrong, Neil Sedaka, the Platters, Adriano Celentano, Peppino Di Capri, Don Marino Barreto Jr, Milva, Ella Fitzgerald, Domenico Modugno, Gilbert Bécaud and Mina, who was always deeply attached to Bernardini and his Bussola. Adjoining La Bussola, Bernardini opened Il Bussolotto, devoted to jazz, where Chet Baker also played.
In 1976 Bernardini created Bussoladomani, a larger venue a short distance away in the Lido di Camaiore district: a marquee suited to shows and concerts. It was here that, in the summer of 1978, Mina gave her farewell to the stage with a series of live concerts. Bussoladomani was later closed and the marquee demolished in 2000.