Nice to Tuscany by train: the Côte d'Azur door.

The fourth of our seven Doors to Italy is the one the French use without thinking about it. At Ventimiglia the SNCF network ends: the TER from Nice — under an hour, running all day — pulls in, and everything beyond the platform belongs to Trenitalia. You change trains, and with them an entire railway culture. That change is the door.

Why this door turns inland

Every guidebook route from the French border runs the same way: along the coast to the Cinque Terre. This one refuses. The five famous villages are the most crowded kilometres of coastline in Italy, and — a detail worth knowing — the Cinque Terre stretch is excluded from the Italia in Tour regional pass anyway. So the route takes the Riviera di Ponente as far as Genoa, then turns inland at La Spezia: into the Lunigiana, a Tuscan valley system of castle towns the crowds have never reached, and across to the Garfagnana, where a slow railway threads the Apuan Alps down to Lucca.

The trunk, stop by stop

Sanremo first: two nights for La Pigna, the old town that climbs the hill in concentric lanes, and the Liberty-era seafront the Riviera built in its first golden age. Then the long regional curve through Imperia and Savona to Genoa — Regionale Veloce takes about two and a half hours, the Intercity just under two, with roughly nineteen trains a day. Genoa deserves its two nights: one of Europe's largest medieval old towns, vertical, loud and entirely itself.

At La Spezia the route leaves the coast. The Parma line — hourly regionali since the timetable reform — climbs into the Lunigiana to Pontremoli, a stone town among castles where the local dish, testaroli, predates almost everything else on an Italian menu. From Aulla the Garfagnana railway takes over: Equi Terme under the marble flanks of the Apuan Alps, Castelnuovo di Garfagnana in the valley's centre, Barga on its hill. The line ends in Lucca, one regional hop from Pisa and Florence — which is where this door hands you back to the Italy everyone already knows.

The pass question

Italia in Tour covers the regional trains on this route once you are in Italy — the Riviera regionali, the Parma line, the Garfagnana railway. It does not cover the French TER to Ventimiglia, Intercity services, or the Cinque Terre stretch this route skips anyway. Full details are in our Italia in Tour guide.

The route page carries the stop-by-stop plan with nights and rail legs: see the full route. Full destination profiles for Sanremo, Genoa, the Lunigiana and the Garfagnana are in progress and will join the platform as they clear our editorial checks — the same eighteen-block template, density scores included, as every other place here.