What is Camaiore known for?

Wide Versilia beach with Bandiera Blu and a row of bagni concessions running back to the early 1900s belle époque. The pilgrimage route from Canterbury to Rome enters Camaiore at the Badia di San Pietro and leaves it eastbound for Lucca. Twelfth-century Romanesque church, the surviving piece of a Benedictine monastery first documented in 761 under Lombard rule.

Camaiore is a comune in the province of Lucca, Tuscany region of Italy, about 33 kilometers from Pisa.

Tuscany · Lucca

Camaiore

The Versilia commune that runs from the Apuan Alps to the sea, a Roman Campus Maior on the Via Francigena with a beach at its western end.

33 km / 21 mi

Nearest hub (Pisa)

31,842

Population

May–Sep

Best time to visit

Recognised as

Why come

Camaiore stretches from the Apuan Alps to the Versilia coastline, the only Versilia commune with substantial territory in both. The town center sitson the alluvial plain, named Campus Maior by the Romans for a military encampment on the road from Lucca to Luni. The Via Francigena runs through it, Stage 26 from Massa arriving at the Badia di San Pietro and Stage 27 leaving for Lucca. The Badia, a twelfth-century Romanesque church, is the surviving piece of a Benedictine monastery first documented in 761 under Lombard rule. The Collegiata di Santa Maria Assunta dates from the thirteenth century and the bell tower from the fourteenth. Six kilometers west, Lido di Camaiore opens onto a wide Versilia beach with the Apuan Alps as backdrop, granted Bandiera Blu status and lined with the bagni concessions that have stood since Gabriele D'Annunzio summered here in the 1900s.

The slow-trip planner

Building a trip? Find where Camaiore fits in a slow Italy circuit.

Answer five questions. We will shape a geographically coherent slow trip from the 1,000 Italian towns most travelers skip. Yours to save and share.

Plan your trip

Gallery

6 photos · scroll →

We've been

Feature from our free newsletter

I Could Get Old Here

I watched eight old men stand up at once, and something in me quietly rearranged itself. They had been sitting at Caffè Celero on Piazza San Bernardino for most of an hour, maybe longer, doing what men over sixty do on an Italian piazza, which is nothing, but nothing done carefully and particularly.

Read the full feature on anywhereitaly.com

We’ve tried

Restaurants, walks, swims. Things we tried in Camaiore.

The mountain hamlet that scratched its dead into the walls: Casoli.
Casoli | The Village That Decided to Be Interesting
The tordello, the meat-stuffed pasta that is Versilia telling you it isn't Lucca.
Tordello | What the tordello says
Erbe, the bitter boiled greens that make a kilo of rare beef sit like a virtue.
Erbe | The Greens on the Side
The bistecca alla fiorentina, and why everyone who tries to improve it ruins it.
The Fiorentina Steak | Leave it alone

Known for

Collegiata di Santa Maria Assunta
Thirteenth-century parish church with a fourteenth-century bell tower, the central religious building of the inland town.
Badia di San Pietro
Twelfth-century Romanesque church, the surviving structure of a Benedictine monastery documented in 761 during Lombard rule.
Lido di Camaiore
Bandiera Blu beach six kilometers from the town center, with fine sand and the Apuan Alps rising directly behind it.
Centro storico
Medieval grid along Via Vittorio Emanuele, walking distance from the original Roman castrum perimeter.
Via Francigena
Stage 26 from Massa enters at the Badia di San Pietro; Stage 27 leaves for Lucca through the eastern olive groves.
Grotta all'Onda
Prehistoric cave on the Casoli hill above the town, with Mesolithic and Neolithic finds in the Pisa archaeological museum.

When to visit

Best months · May–Sep

Best
Hot or crowded
Quiet
Mostly closed

May through September runs the Versilia season at the Lido and gives the inland town its share of light evenings. June and September are the quieter brackets: warm enough for the sea, cool enough to walk the Francigena stages without losing the morning. July and August fill the Lido with families from Lucca and Milan, parking gets tight, and the inland piazze stay calmer than the seafront. October through April most beach concessions close. The inland town keeps a rhythm built around the Tuesday market, the Francigena pilgrims who still pass through in shoulder season, and the Sant'Antonio festa in mid-January.