Mulazzo

Mulazzo sits in the Lunigiana, the corner of Toscana that bends north toward Liguria and Emilia. The town was an imperial fief of the Malaspina family from 1164, the seat of the marquisate that descended from Moroello Malaspina, and the place where Dante Alighieri is believed to have stayed in 1306 during his exile from Firenze. The Torre di Dante, the medieval tower at the head of the borgo, was once thirty meters high and six stories tall; most of it was demolished around 1750, and what remains is a sixth of the original mass.

The Alessandro Malaspina study centre, inside the tower, holds materials on the eighteenth-century navigator from the same family who mapped the Pacific coast of the Americas for the Spanish crown. Three kilometers up the ridge, the frazione of Montereggio is the only Italian member of the International Organisation of Book Towns, in honor of the booksellers who left the village in the nineteenth century with panniers of books on their backs to sell across central and northern Italy.