Follonica has a church with a cast-iron pronaos, rose window and furnishings: San Leopoldo, one of a kind in Italy, cast in the 1830s by the grand-ducal foundries that smelted Elba's iron ore here with charcoal from the Maremma woods. MAGMA, the cast-iron arts museum inside the former foundry, tells that story of Tuscany's own industrial revolution.
When the furnaces went cold, the town of 21,479 reinvented itself on the beach: its namesake gulf lines up kilometres of sand backed by pinewoods, with Elba on the horizon. The Lorraine dynasty's factory town is now one of the Maremma's summer capitals.
Near Follonica
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
