Tuscany's Undiscovered Maremma Region
Superyachts, stylish hotels, and an explosion of Michelin stars have come to the Maremma. It’s still pretty much perfetto.
It was 1985, and I’d landed on my feet in Italy. The sun was low in the sky as I left Rome, driving with my Italian friend Marella Caracciolo. As we headed north, the city’s melancholy hinterland gave way to more pastoral and more beautiful surroundings. Cypresses and umbrella pines cast long shadows as the sun set over the Tyrrhenian Sea. Our journey’s end was Garavicchio, the estate long owned by Marella’s family in the Maremma, a little-visited stretch along the coast of southwestern Tuscany.
We spent the next few days kicking around spots like the seaside town of Chiarone, not much more than a bar, a store, and miles of empty, idyllic beaches. A handful of families—Marella seemed to know them all—were down for the summer. We walked for hours, exploring the area’s unspoiled lakes and marshy grasslands brimming with cormorants and kingfishers; its maquis and juniper woodlands, home to deer and wild boar; and its pristine dunes, covered with the white, creamy-scented flowers of sea daffodils.
Now a quarter of a century has passed. My Italian sojourn ended some time ago, but Marella remains a friend and Garavicchio still a home away from home for her family. And the Maremma? The Maremma is changing.
These days Tuscany’s last frontier is filling with newcomers from Rome and beyond. In the town of Capalbio, the summer streets echo with the raised voices of a honey-tanned crowd spilling from Il Frantoio, a fashionable bar-gallery-boutique. Down at Chiarone, languid models float around Ultima Spiaggia, a chic little beach club. Erstwhile fishing villages such as Castiglione della Pescaia play host to hedge fund managers and Russian superyachts.
Elsewhere in the Maremma, stylish hotels are appearing and long-abandoned villas ring to the sound of the restorer’s hammer. Restaurants are opening and Michelin stars are being scattered like confetti. Italy’s prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, was said to have been eyeing a $25 million estate near Cinigiano. In the seaside town of Puntone, Leonardo Ferragamo, a scion of the Ferragamo fashion dynasty, created one of Italy’s most dazzling marinas. And in the hills near Gavorrano, architect Renzo Piano completed a showstopping $11 million winery at the Rocca di Frassinello vineyard, a partnership between the Rothschilds and Italian media mogul Paolo Panerai.
And the hotels are not just any hotels. The biggest new name in the Maremma is Alain Ducasse. The French hotelier and restaurateur has invested serious panache—and cash—in L’Andana, his five-star venture near Grosseto, the region’s capital. It is whispered that Bulgari is hot on his heels.
You could forgive the Maremma its belated arrival on center stage. Little in its past suggests it was destined for anything but obscurity. Maremma L’Amara—“Maremma the Bitter”—it was called, after its cruel, unforgiving land, where marshes bred malaria and misery. For centuries virtually the only inhabitants were shepherds, charcoal burners, and itinerant horsemen. Inland, these unhappy few were prey to bandits; on the mosquito-infested coast, Saracen pirates were the enemy. The region was a place of exile, death, and despair. In the 14th century Dante wrote of “the wild beasts that hate the cultivated fields in the Tuscan Maremma.”
While malaria may have been the region’s curse, it was also its salvation. Until the disease was eradicated, in the fifties, visitors didn’t come here. Even today, the roads, beaches, hotels, and restaurants are largely free of the crowds that blight the Tuscan heartland.
Nor does the Maremma have towns brimming with art. Only Massa Marittima, a medieval gem—all cobbled alleys, Romanesque churches, and majestic altarpieces—can really hold its own with Tuscany’s heavy hitters: the Pisas, Luccas, and Sienas. But this being Italy, every village has its treasures. Tiny Sovana, basically a single street, is home to the 12th- to 13th-century Santa Maria Maggiore, one of Tuscany’s loveliest churches. Spectacular, crag-topped Pitigliano is surrounded by miles of eerie Etruscan tombs. Magliano has its ruined abbey and Sorano its medieval fortress.
