Is Pisa Worth Visiting? A Day for the City, More if You Use It as a Base

Is Pisa worth visiting? Yes, for a day. Two hours covers the tower and the square around it, and after that you’re in an ordinary Italian city, which is the part most visitors miss because they’re already on the train to Florence or the coast. I guide walks on the mountains near Pisa, and when clients ask me how many days to give the city, I say one. I’d give its railway station a week.

That’s the case for this page. Three separate mountain ranges sit within reach of Pisa Centrale, and the nearest one starts fifteen minutes up the line. Pisa isn’t a mountain town, and I’ll say plainly what it isn’t further down. As a place to sleep while you walk in western Tuscany, though, it’s hard to beat: cheaper beds than Florence, an airport you can almost walk to, and a regional railway that reaches real trails without a car.

Using Pisa as your base? A local’s Expert Brief shows you the nature just past the tower. Already in Tuscany? Send me your dates on WhatsApp and I'll tell you what we can do together, and when.

How Many Days in Pisa?

One for the city, and I’d plan it around your flight. If you land at Pisa, sleep that first night in town. The airport is inside the city, a short PisaMover ride from Pisa Centrale, so there’s no transfer to book and no reason to set off anywhere tired. See the tower in the afternoon, eat two blocks away from the square in the evening, and you’ve had the Pisa most people get in two hours plus the part they don’t.

Every night after that is a base night, and I’d only book it with a plan for the trains. Lucca is the prettier place to sleep between walks, and I’ve said so in is Lucca worth visiting. Pisa wins on the airport, the price of the bed and the number of lines out of its station.

Why Pisa works as a base

Pisa Centrale is an ugly station and a useful one. Regional trains leave for Lucca every half hour or so (25–30 minutes), for Florence (about an hour), Viareggio (30 minutes), and La Spezia and the Cinque Terre (an hour and a half to two). You can day-trip to all of them and sleep in the same bed.

The beds cost less than in Florence, because the coastal towns compete for the same visitors. The train-accessible trails are the rare part. Most mountain walking in Tuscany needs a car, and here the Nottolini aqueduct day I guide starts a short walk from Lucca station, half an hour up the line, and the ridge of Monte Pisano has two stations at its foot.

No car in Tuscany? Plenty of my hikes work perfectly without one. Browse the train-accessible hikes.

The Mountains Near Pisa

Pisa sits on the plain, and the mountains stand to the east and the north of it. Monte Pisano, the wooded ridge, rises right behind the city, and on a clear day the Apuan Alps stand as a pale wall on the northern horizon. The Apennines lie further inland, out of sight from the city and about two hours away by car.

The numbers above come from the routes I guide, one on each range, with the Monte Pisano one paused for now while the castle at the top of it is restored. Monte Pisano needs a train ticket and a morning. The Apuane need a car and a Saturday or Sunday. The Apennines need a car and a full day, plus a weather forecast you’ve actually read. How the three fit into the rest of the region is in the Tuscany mountain ranges guide.

Monte Pisano: the ridge next door

Monte Pisano runs between the Pisa plain and the Lucca plain, and it never gets above 1,000 metres. Its summit, Monte Serra, measures 917. For centuries it was the border between two republics that couldn’t stand each other, which is why the walk I guided on it ends at a fortress.

That fortress is the Rocca di San Paolino above Ripafratta, and right now you can’t get to it. Restoration works have closed the castle, the path is blocked a short way below the walls, and the sign at the works gives no end date, so I’ve taken the Ripafratta day off sale and left its page up for when it reopens. I’m leaving the walk’s numbers here for the same reason. Ripafratta has its own station on the Pisa–Lucca line, roughly 20 minutes from Pisa Centrale for €3–4, and the path starts a few minutes’ walk from the platform: 3.3 km, 130 metres of climb, about two and a half hours if you spend proper time on the walls. The climb goes up through bay laurel, nearly pure stands of Laurus nobilis reaching 10 to 15 metres, so that on a warm afternoon the whole slope smells of the kitchen cupboard. The castle at the top keeps a 12th-century core and its 1504 rebuild for cannon in the same walls, and from the ramparts you see both plains, Pisa on one side and Lucca on the other.

I’ll admit the photos I’ve put online from Ripafratta don’t show that view, only the walls up close, and the reshoot now waits for the castle to reopen. The one hazard on the walk itself is rain, which turns the limestone slippery on the way down. Until the gate opens again, the day I offer in its place from the same railway is the Nottolini aqueduct, further down this page.

The other way up Monte Pisano by train is the Passo di Dante. San Giuliano Terme, ten minutes from Pisa on the same line, has a station at the foot of the ridge, and from there you climb through olive terraces and then woodland to a narrow gap in the crest, two to three hours there and back. Dante names this ridge in Inferno XXXIII as the mountain that stops the Pisans seeing Lucca. Whether he ever crossed it, nobody knows. I don’t run it as a guided day. The route notes and the train times are in the car-free guide, and the rest of the day walks from Pisa, four of them ranked by effort, are in the hiking trails near Pisa.

The Apuan Alps: marble an hour north

Drive an hour north and the hills stop being hills. The Apuan Alps rise steep and bare, and what looks like snow on them from Pisa is marble, quarried without a break since Roman times. Michelangelo carved the David from this stone. It’s also a proper mountain range, with peaks just under 2,000 metres and one of the deepest cave systems in Europe underneath them.

There I guide the Marmifera del Corchia, an unpaved road cut into the mountainside to bring marble down from the Corchia quarries. The trailhead at Levigliani lies 61 km from Pisa, car only, and the road is closed to walkers on weekdays because the marble trucks use it. On a Saturday or Sunday it’s silent. Seven kilometres in total, 420 metres of climb, and every one of those metres sits in the first half, so the way out is one long steady pull from 1,150 metres with nothing flat to recover on. Your legs will know about it. The reward is the view over the Versilia coast and the quarries themselves, seen from the road because they’re working private sites and you can’t go in.

Private guided hike

Marmifera del Corchia

The road climbs past active quarries with Viareggio and Forte dei Marmi below you. On clear days you can pick out Corsica.

• About 3.5 hours
• €210 per group
• Saturdays and Sundays only

Medium-Easy · 7 km (4.3 mi) · 420 m (1,378 ft) ascent

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The Apennines: high lakes two hours inland

The tower doesn’t show you the third range. The Tuscan-Emilian Apennines rise above Pistoia and Abetone, and the three routes I guide up there all start around 1,300 to 1,500 metres and end on or near the crest that divides Tuscany from Emilia-Romagna.

Lago Nero sits at 1,730 metres in a glacial cirque, eight kilometres and 450 metres of climb from the trailhead, about five hours with stops, most of it through beech and fir before the trees end and the basin opens. Lago Scaffaiolo sits higher, at 1,775, in a saddle right on the crest, nine and a half kilometres and 370 metres of climb, about six hours, and on a bad day you see forty metres and the wind doesn’t stop. Rifugio Duca degli Abruzzi stands beside it, open from 1 June to 30 September. Monte Gennaio, at 1,814 metres, makes the summit day, 9.5 km and 500 metres of climb through old beech forest onto the border ridge.

None of the three is reachable by train, and that’s the honest limit of the Apennines from Pisa. From Lucca the trailheads are under an hour and a half by car; from Pisa add half an hour. If you don’t have a car, tell me when you write and I’ll help you find a solution. The full account of both lakes, including when they’re actually walkable, is in the lakes near Lucca and Pisa.

Private guided hike

Lago Scaffaiolo

Once you’re up, the path runs along a broad, grassy crest to the lake, with Tuscany on one side and Emilia-Romagna on the other.

• About 6 hours
• €240 per group
• Shorter or longer day on request

Medium · 9.5 km (5.9 mi) · 370 m (1,214 ft) ascent

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The Flat Days

Two outings from Pisa involve no climbing at all. The Nottolini Aqueduct, 460 brick arches built between 1823 and 1851 to bring spring water into Lucca, is a flat 9.1 km walk from Lucca station, 25 to 30 minutes by train from Pisa, and with Ripafratta paused it’s the one day I guide that you can reach from Pisa Centrale without a car. The photography guide has the route stretch by stretch, written so you can walk it alone; on the guided version we carry on past the last arch to the source that feeds it and come back the same way.

Private guided hike

Nottolini Aqueduct

The aqueduct doubles as a sundial. Once a day the light runs straight down its corridor of arches, at a time that shifts through the year.

• About 3 hours
• €165 per group
• Reachable by train
• Longer route to a view over Lucca, on request

Easy · 9.1 km (5.7 mi) · 50 m (164 ft) ascent

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San Rossore park, on the city’s own doorstep, has barrier-free paths and a beach, and you reach it from the centre by bicycle, by bus or on foot. It’s described in the accessible nature post.

A Week Based in Pisa

One shape a week could take, with the Apuane pinned to the weekend because the Marmifera only opens then:

• Day 1: Arrive, Piazza dei Miracoli, settle in
• Day 2: Train to Lucca, walk the Nottolini arches with me, the city walls after
• Day 3: Train to San Giuliano Terme and the Passo di Dante on your own, route notes in the car-free guide
• Day 4: Train to Florence for the museums
• Day 5 (Saturday): Drive to the Apuan Alps for the Marmifera del Corchia, my route on the quarry road
• Day 6: Cinque Terre by train, or the full day I guide at Lago Scaffaiolo, car needed
• Day 7: San Rossore in the morning, then home

Swap days around the weather. The point is the range of it. An aqueduct, a ridge crossing, a marble road and a lake on the Apennine crest, all from one hotel. When the Rocca reopens, the Ripafratta half-day goes back into day three.

What Pisa Isn’t

It isn’t charming the way Lucca is, and it isn’t Florence. The tower quarter is packed all day, though two blocks away it’s an ordinary Italian city with good restaurants and nobody selling selfie sticks. And you won’t wake up to a mountain view, because you’re on the plain. If you want to sleep among the peaks, base yourself in Abetone or the Garfagnana instead. Pisa is for the other plan: one bed and three ranges, with a €3–4 train ticket to the foot of the nearest of them.

Pisa also works as a base for the wider country covered in hiking in Tuscany, and if you’d rather not do the trails alone, here’s how to find a local guide.