I guess it’s not the sort of place you’d think about when planning a mountain walking holiday. After all, isn’t Tuscany all about fields of flowers with stands of Cypress trees and little villages of red-roofed houses? Add in some good food and plenty of red wine and you’ll have most people’s vision of Tuscany.

But wild Tuscany is quite different. The good food and the wine are still there, but instead of fields think of mountains that rise to 2000m, an excellent network of signposted walking routes, and tiny villages that perch on mountain ridges, many of them with good restaurants for a lunchtime stop. Oh, and add views of Italy’s Ligurian coast from the mountain tops.

I’d never even heard of the Apuane Alps of Tuscany, although I had heard of the Appenines, which rise on the other side of the Serchio valley in the Garfagnana region of Italy, about an hour’s drive north of Pisa. An old colleague on the Sunday Herald, Richard Bath, put me in touch with good friends of his, Ailsa and Jamie Reynolds, who run an organic farm in the foothills of the Apuane Alps. Jamie also runs walking holidays from the farm, which is kitted out to accommodate about a dozen people. We chatted, Jamie and Ailsa invited me to visit and I did. And it was fabulous.

I get a great kick out of exploring mountain ranges that are new to me and Jamie was the perfect guide. We climbed hills, explored new trails and drank a lot of wine and I discovered that the Apuane hills are a hidden gem, probably unknown to most hillwalking Brits but an area of northern Tuscany that deserves to be better known. And Ailsa’s cooking… Wow! There is nothing better, after a long day in the hills, to come back to a comfortable base, enjoy a hot shower then sit down for an evening of fabulous food, plenty of wine, and excellent company. That was my experience of Lavacchio, Jamie and Ailsa’s farm-cum-walking holiday centre. I can heartily recommend it. Check out their website.

And the wonderful think about this part of Italy is that it’s dead easy to get to. We flew Ryanair from Prestick to Pisa. We left Scotland about 7.30 and by midday we were at Lavacchio eating freshy baked pizzas from the farm’s outdoor wood-fired pizza oven, drinking ice-cold white wine. In the afternoon we went to the mountains. What could better?

I’ll be writing up a full feature about Lavacchio for TGO in the near future - probably the July issue.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 12th, 2009 at 9:09 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.