[img_assist|fid=449|thumb=1|alt=Tuscany's alps] May 21, 2006 By TIMOTHY EGAN Enough of the Tuscan sun. Enough with the cypress trees, the ochre-colored villas and the knots of tourists draining every trattoria of oxygen and charm. A Florentine friend bemoaned that his beloved city had become a Renaissance theme park. Ditto the countryside, though the theme is different. I love it more than any landscape that has been shaped by human hands, but it was time for a break. Instead of waiting in line to see the David, why not go to the source of the David? Instead of paying 300 euros a night for a room with a view, why not get a better view — free? Instead of drinking Chiantis and brunellos that were sniffed to death by wine critics, why not enjoy some unknown juice — vino that tastes of higher elevations, different soils and simpler times? Such was my thinking, muddled though it was, on a family trip to Italy last summer. Not long ago, we lived in Tuscany; our children went to public school in the heart of the Chianti Classico district, where the black rooster symbol of one of the world's oldest wine regions is as ubiquitous as the crucifix. We have seen Siena in all seasons, probed Etruscan tombs outside Volterra and wondered what Donald Trump would do to mess with the ancient skyscrapers of San Gimignano, the medieval Manhattan. On this last trip, I was restless, with a traveler's wandering eye. My son would not look at another church, and my daughter was taking far too much interest in Italian boys and their Vespas. We were staying outside Lucca, the walled city not far from Pisa, when the answer to my need for fresh stimuli appeared. This was no vision, but a constant on the skyline — the Apuan Alps. They glimmered, the marble flanks snow-white in the midday sun. At the lower elevations, the Apuans looked green and overgrown and even a little mysterious, though they were just a few miles away. I had seen them from the beach at Viareggio a day before, and now, like a lapsed memory, they called. The trick was convincing my family to follow that call. The teenagers liked the idea of spending midday in the mountains; it was the execution that wore them down, so far from the instant gratification of gelato bars and Internet cafes. Hiking alone can be boring. Hiking with a brood is a carrot-and-stick act requiring logistical dexterity. But over the course of a few days of walking we found Tuscany's lost corner. If the Sierra Nevada is the American "range of light," as John Muir said, the Apuans are Italy's anonymous Alps — a compact, cultivated clot of mountains wedged between the Ligurian Sea and the better-known Apennines. Within the limestone walls of the Apuans are dozens of high villages clinging to mountain flanks, stone forts so long-abandoned they look like part of the landscape, and Italy's largest cave system. This is a human landscape in a stunning setting; you are as likely to stumble upon a cranky shepherd speaking an indecipherable dialect or a herd of well-mannered German trekkers as you are to wander through an empty meadow. Five-hundred-year-old monasteries are bolted to bedrock in unlikely places. You can lose yourself in the Apuans, but it is almost impossible to become lost. For every trail, ultimately, connects to a village, a small road, or another trail. There is no wilderness. But there is that unpredictability so rare in much of modern travel. IF they are known at all, the Apuans usually merit a footnote in the telling of Renaissance masters. While still a young man, Michelangelo kept a residence among the white stone quarries of Carrara. It was said he could see the face — or at least the rough shape — of his figures while looking at uncut walls of stone. The David was carved from a piece of Carrara marble and still today, quarry men from Carrara slice away marble and ship it around the world. The town has a gritty ambiance, with a cathedral built with the trademark local stone. Some of its quarries are open for touring. But this is no place for the mountain soul; the hills are deeply scarred, roaded with switchbacks and industrial. The heart of the Apuans is just over the crests, inland. For an overview from sea level, the walk around Lucca, atop the glorious, tree-lined walls may be the best passeggiata in Italy — the urbane, bicycle-loving city on the inside, the Apuans just off in the distance. They are not big peaks, ranging 2,000 to 6,000 feet, but they hold their winter snow through midspring and frame the sunset on most days. The main valley into the Apuans follows the Serchio River outside Lucca up a gentle grade to a series of lakes, towns and trailheads. The valley is so narrow in parts that for years only a train could get through. Now there are good roads, with occasional bad drivers who tailgate within inches of your car and pass on blind turns — the Italian way. The Roman print on this land is large, but so is that of the British and the Germans. The Romans established Lucca and built roads, villas and aqueducts in the foothills. They also tried to dislodge earlier inhabitants, the Ligurian-Apuanians, who were defeated in 179 B.C. The Apuans never lost their warrior reputation, as entrenched German soldiers discovered after they dug into the mountains in a stubborn retreat. In a land with ancient memories, the World War II reprisals against the local partisans are fresh. The British influence was more benign. The Grand Tour crowd had a thing for thermal baths, and of course imperial gardening. Fleeing the gray skies of London, English travelers helped to make Bagni di Lucca, with its numerous hot springs, a major resort destination in the 19th century. They formed alpine clubs, built the neo-Gothic English Church and also imported azaleas by the boatload. Bagni di Lucca is a gateway to the mountains. The right fork leads to higher peaks, up and over the crest of the Apennines to Modena and Bologna; the left fork follows the Serchio to the Apuans. The Apuans are inside a large regional park, which is nothing like a national park in the American sense. The park is relatively new — 20 years old last year. Within its invisible borders are protections for wildlife, geological, historical and archaeological sites and some of the land. But the park also holds the patterns of everyday life, of small towns and farms, of chestnut harvesters and goat tenders and über-recreators on mountain bike, horseback or foot. I never knew whether I was inside the park or out. But it hardly mattered. We had left most of familiar Italy behind as we followed the Serchio upstream to a landscape that had a dreamy quality. During the warm months, Italy is dun-colored, the sun having burned an orange, yellow or sienna hue into the land. The lowlands of the Apuans, crowded with trees, brought a quick change to sense-around green. These mountains are cloaked in chestnut trees, which provide mills with a grist that becomes flour — an Apuan speciality, along with mushrooms and berries. Dreams are usually illogical, and so is one of the first impressive sites up the Serchio River — the Ponte del Diavolo, the Devil's Bridge, in the town of Borgo a Mozzano. The bridge dates to the 14th century and looks like it was built by two groups of people who never spoke to each other. It's too narrow for a car and too steep for a scooter or bike. It's formed by three typical-looking arches and then a fourth, larger, loopier one that rises well above the riverbank. A few miles upstream is Fornaci di Barga, a good stop for trekkers coming by train who have no other transportation to the trails. Otherwise, Castelnuovo di Garfagnana, farther up the valley, serves as the center and prime jumping-off point for the lakes and upper trails of the park, which maintains a visitor center stocked with maps and service references. THERE are nearly 450 miles of trails in the Apuans, most well-marked and well-maintained. Some are sheep-paths, colonized by the Italian Alpine Club, which has maps and other useful information. The hikes are not all that strenuous, but that's a relative term. Some of the trails course around the lower elevations under the canopy of oak and chestnut forests; others climb to rocky summits for drop-dead views of the Ligurian Sea or east to the Apennines. Throughout the mountains, at balcony perches and trail ends and other prime locales, are stone or timber huts, called rifugios. By calling in advance, you can plot multiday hikes, staying at a different hut each night. This has many advantages over the kind of wilderness backpacking that I'm used to, mainly better food and wine, not to mention a lighter pack. The most famous hike in Italy, perhaps, is the along the rocky path that connects the Cinque Terre on the Ligurian Coast — not far, as the dove flies, from the Apuan peaks. I have walked the route to the five coastal villages several times, and it's always glorious. But, alas, the Cinque Terre has become one of those places where you have to take a number to have your serendipitous moment. In high season, it is always rush hour on those cliffs above the sea. Part of the appeal of the Apuans is their lost quality. Italians in the know go there to cross-country ski, mountain bike, hike and flee the heat. Same with Germans and Britons. But I never saw another Yank in the Apuans. One morning we took a left at the town of Gallicano and coaxed our tiny diesel Smart Car up the mountains to the village of Trassilico. The kids were cramped in the back, holding off their whines until later. The higher peaks and the white rock of their summits were the lure. Trassilico clings to the spine of a ridge and could have been in the Himalayas but for the lower elevation. There was a rifugio in the village and an airy, somewhat off-plumb church that captured a small square of mountain air and distilled it into a spiritual escape. We walked up to the hollowed out core of an old fortress, with views of any invading armies or rival kingdoms, and then took off on a separate path that corkscrewed through the woods to a summit. As the forest cover thinned in the higher reaches, the views opened up. Looking one way, I saw a cluster of red-roof houses hugging the side of what looked to be a very steep mountainside — a town, looking as indigenous as a chestnut tree. Villages that defy gravity and the ages are all over the Apuans. I was getting that "Sound of Music" feeling, which made everyone else cringe. I had used a lure to get my 15-year-old boy to this point. He wanted to do only one thing in Italy: e-mail his friends back home, no doubt to exchange expressions of apt boredom and sullen disgust. Stay with the trail, I told him, and there's probably a little Internet bar at one of the villages. For a while, it worked. He was silent and moved at a brisk pace. My wife and daughter marveled at the lack of carnivorous bugs. Accustomed to the flesh-eating horse flies of our hikes in the American West, they reveled in a summer trek without tiny-winged predators. From the top of the Trassilico hike, the town of Minucciano, just beneath the highest peak in the park — 6,032-foot Mount Pisanino — looked as if it were going to fall off the cliff at any moment. But it was not close enough to satisfy my bribe to get my son this high. He sulked. And I owed him. Another day, we went looking for alpine swimming holes. My boy stoked up in advance on his e-mails in Lucca, so he had no complaints. At least, that was my argument. I had in mind cool water, a shady beach and lunch. After asking around, we were sent to a couple of the Apuan's better lakes. At Lake Pontecosi, the water was cold enough, and we had it to ourselves. But the bottom was muck, and the water not clear enough to pass the rigorous standards set by my children, who were raised on Cascade Mountain gems in the Pacific Northwest. Finally, we followed the fish. From a bridge above the Serchio River near Castelnuovo di Garfagnana we saw schools of big trout in a deep-shaded, clean pool of the river — one of the better swimming holes in the Apuans, as it turned out. Lunch was in the piazza in Castelnuovo. We drank wine from outside the foothills of Lucca — Colline Lucchesi is the appellation, seldom seen in the United States — and ate gnocchi made from Apuan potatoes and chestnut flour breading. In Tuscany's far corner, it was foreign and familiar. IF YOU GO GETTING THERE The mountains are close to any place in Tuscany, the Italian Riviera or Bologna. The nearest airports are Pisa, about 45 miles from Castelnuovo di Garfagnana in the heart of the Serchio River Valley, and Florence, 66 miles away. The nearest big town is Lucca, 30 miles from Castelnuovo. A rental car is a must for getting to the trailheads deeper in the mountains, but there is regular train service from Florence and Pisa — through Lucca — to stops along the Serchio. The train from Pisa, with a change in Lucca, is about two hours. GETTING AROUND The Apuan regional park visitor center in Castelnuovo di Garfagnana (39-0583-644242, www.parcapuane.it) has maps, and information on how to book huts, explore the region's caves, hire guides and rent mountain bikes or horses. The tourist office in Garfagnana (39-0583-644473, www.garfagnanaturistica.info) is a good stop for hotel bookings, hiking and restaurant suggestions and tips on other sites in the region. It's possible to explore much of the area on bike, though the higher reaches are not easy climbs. Garfagnana Adventures organizes trips and has bikes and guides for hire (39-3475-139794, www.garfagnanaadventures.com). WHERE TO STAY Accommodations range from the elegance of old resort towns like Bagni di Lucca in the lower elevations to primitive huts high in the mountains. Most of the huts, called rifugios, are only open through the summer, but a few are year-round. Rifugio la Mesta, clinging to the mountain spine in the village of Trassilico (39-0583-722150) is open year-round, with 15 beds at 20 euros a night ($26 at $1.30 to the euro). The view down to the valley and to other Apuan peaks is memorable. Inside the thousand-year-old monastery latched to the stone at the Eremo di Calomini is Antica Trattoria dell'Eremita (39-0583-767020), a simple bed-and-breakfast-style lodge with shared bathrooms and a big community-style dining room. It's open from March through the end of October, and rates are 23 euros to 25 euros ($30 to $32.50) a person. Calomini is just outside Castelnuovo di Garfagnana. Lo Scoiattolo (39-0583-611071) is a high-end hotel at the north end of the Apuans, fairly high up in the town of Minucciano. It has 22 rooms and a big restaurant. Prices range from 103 euros to 145 euros. WHERE TO EAT The regional specialties — spelt wheat, an ancient grain consumed by Roman legionnaires; chestnut flour; and local mushrooms — are seldom found anywhere else in Tuscany. Muliono del Rancone (39-0583-618670) is a small restaurant just outside the town of Camporgiano, six miles north of Castelnuovo. It specializes in regional cuisine, using faro in soups and hand-rolled pastas, with wines from the Lucca foothills. Abete Bianco (39-0583-661025) is a tiny, stone-front restaurant and pizzeria in Carregine, a town that dates to the ninth century, perched on the side of a mountain with great views of surrounding peaks. Buca di Sant'Antonio (39-0583-55881) attracts poets, film stars and travelers on the Tuscan cuisine route. It's inside the walls of Lucca, which though not technically in the Apuan Alps, is the closest major city. Roasted goat and pappardelle with hare sauce are among the specialties of this place, which has been serving food in the same location for more than 200 years.