HOW TO REACH PONTREMOLI

By car
Leave the A15 motorway at Pontremoli
Follow the SS62 to the town .

By train
The Parma -La Spezia railway www.trenitalia.com

Pontremoli station

The station is about km1,1 from the Piagnaro Castle ; it takes about 15 minutes to reach it walking .

By bus

Cat service www.catspa.it

Pontremoli is in Lunigiana in the northern part of Toscana , in the Massa -Carrara province in that wedge of land that joins Liguria and Emilia ; it is at the foot of the Apennines, at around 250 m on the sea level amongst mountains that almost reach up to two thousand meters .

The city is at the center of a large basin that comprises the wide Magra Valley and the valleys of its tributaries Verde and Gordana , and is connected to the bordering regions by the mountain passes of the Cisa , the Bratello , the Cirone and the Rastrello .  The territory belonging to the town is very large , around 182 square kilometers , which makes it the fourth largest town in Italy .

The town of Pontremoli has developed on the rather circumscribed tongue of land flanked by the river Magra on one side and the Verde stream on the other and closed to the north by the Parma Gate and to the south by the Florentine Gate . It has only been in the last decades that the built-up area has begun to expand in the wide plain on the right of the Verde , now lived in by those who have preferred to move out of the old city center or move into town from the hamlets .

Pontremoli is known as “The city of books “. The tie between the town and books goes as far back as 1458 when , only two years after the invention of the printing machine , a “mercatum tomorum” is registered in the city . The Pontremoli fairs became very important for book-sellers and it was from here , in higher Lunigiana that itinerant book-sellers first set out , a phenomenon that became quite noticeable in the XIX cen. .

These book-sellers’ business branched in northern Italy and abroad ( France , Spain , Central and Southern America ) .

“This is the land where you are born as a book-seller “ wrote Oriana Fallaci in 1952 – and it is precisely from the great tradition of the pontremolese book-sellers that the Literary Prize Bancarella was founded in 1952 . In time , the Bancarellino , for children’s literature and the Bancarella sport that prizes the best books on sport have been added to the main event .