Pistoia, the Tuscan Town I Love Most
People ask me which Tuscan town I would go back to tomorrow, and they expect Siena or Lucca. My answer is Pistoia. It sits forty minutes by train from Florence, it was named Italy’s Capital of Culture in 2017, and on a summer day you can still walk its old center almost alone.
A town that still lives for itself
The first thing you notice is how few visitors there are. Since 2017 the city has started to open up to travelers, but it is a long road, and for now Pistoia still belongs to the people who live in it. Shops open for them. Bars fill for them. It is a city living an ordinary life, which in Tuscany has become a rare thing.
A cathedral square where children play ball
When we reached the Piazza del Duomo, one August day, there were kids kicking a ball across it. I stood there and thought: in Florence, this would be unthinkable. Here it was just a summer afternoon.
The square itself is one of the most beautiful in Tuscany, and you can read the city’s history in it, layer on layer. The cathedral of San Zeno has a bell tower sixty-seven meters tall, its top floors opened up into three tiers of loggias and finished with a cap added in the sixteenth century. You can see right away that it was not built in one go. The marble bands on the buildings around it made me think of Pisa, and of Florence too.
Across from the cathedral stands the baptistery of San Giovanni in Corte, Gothic, fourteenth century, banded in two colors of marble. If you know the baptistery in Florence, you will feel the family resemblance immediately.
Next to it is the old Bishops’ Palace, the most important of the many palazzi in the center, and beneath it there is something I did not expect: Roman Pistoia. An archaeological trail runs through its foundations, past traces of the first Roman settlement and a paved street from the Imperial age.
Walk a few streets further and the styles keep changing: Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, sometimes on the same block. Pistoia gives the eye a great deal for a town of its size.
Dante’s Pistoia, and a silver altar
Pistoia has been famous for a very long time, and not always kindly. Dante put a Pistoiese thief, Vanni Fucci, in the Inferno for robbing the treasury of the cathedral, and then let fly at the whole city: “Ahi Pistoia, Pistoia.” Seven centuries later, the town seems to have forgiven him.
What Vanni Fucci was after is still there. Inside the cathedral, the silver altar of San Jacopo took almost two centuries to finish, from 1287 to 1456, and among the goldsmiths who worked on it was a young Filippo Brunelleschi, decades before he built the dome in Florence. Some of its figures are believed to be his. I find that detail hard to forget: the man who changed Florence’s skyline first learned his trade on this altar.
Lunch where Pistoia eats
The memory I keep most from that day is a lunch. Walking through the center, we were drawn by a trattoria at the edge of the old town, with a tiny square beside it and a few tables outside. It was too hot to sit out, so we ate indoors, at a table among Pistoiesi, not visitors.
The cooking is Pistoia’s own, and it has stayed that way for a simple reason: the town has never had to cook for crowds. In places that live on tourism, menus drift toward what visitors expect. Here they still cook for the people who live upstairs.
Two women were running the dining room that day. Neither of them was in a hurry. They stopped at our table, asked where we were from, and talked to us about Pistoia as if we had all the time in the world. In Florence that almost never happens: a restaurant serving that many people simply cannot stop at every table. And, said with affection, Florentines are not famous for lingering.
That conversation is the reason Pistoia is my favorite. It is the Tuscany people imagine before they arrive: beautiful, layered, and still lived in.
How to fit Pistoia into a Tuscan trip
Pistoia works best as a day from Florence: forty minutes by train, an easy walk from the station to the center, and an afternoon is enough to fall for it. In my Florence & the Tuscan Hills tour it is Day 3, between the Oltrarno and Lucca, with lunch in one of the old osterie.
If you are still deciding which Italy is yours, my Italy guide is a good place to start. And if Pistoia is already on your list, tell me about your trip. I’ll build the day around it.
