There’s a road south of Grosseto where the hills stop and the pines take over completely — thick, dark forest running right down to a beach you can’t see from the car. The first time I drove this stretch alone, on a day off, I remember thinking it didn’t look like Tuscany at all. No cypress-lined driveways, no vineyards climbing a hillside. Just wild coast, quiet enough that I could hear the sea before I could see it. That’s the Parco della Maremma, and it’s the one part of this region almost none of my clients ask about, because almost nobody outside Italy has heard of it.
What this place actually is
The Parco Regionale della Maremma was founded in 1975, the first protected area established in Tuscany, and it covers roughly nine thousand hectares between the Ombrone river and the Uccellina hills — about twenty kilometers of coastline that has never been developed. No hotels on the sand, no beach clubs, nothing. Just pine forest planted in the 1800s over old dune systems, dense Mediterranean scrub, and a scattering of watchtowers built centuries ago to spot pirates before they landed.
It’s easy to forget, walking through it, that this land was inhabited and farmed as far back as the Etruscans and Romans, who exported wine and olive oil from a lagoon port near here that no longer exists. Malaria and centuries of flooding eventually drove people out, and by the time the park was created, nature had reclaimed almost all of it. Deer, wild boar, porcupines, and foxes move through the forest more or less undisturbed, and the shallow wetlands near the Ombrone are one of the great migratory bird crossings of the Mediterranean.
Walking to San Rabano
The best hike in the park leads to the ruins of the Abbazia di San Rabano, a monastery built around 1100 on the ridge of the Uccellina hills. At its peak in the 1200s it had twenty or thirty monks living there, running what was effectively a small self-sufficient town — a library, a pharmacy, guest quarters for pilgrims arriving by boat at the nearby port of Cala di Forno. The Black Death gutted the community in the 1300s, and what was left was later turned into a fortress by the Knights of St. John before Siena’s army dismantled it for stone in 1439. It sat abandoned and half-forgotten in the woods for five hundred years before restoration work began in the 1970s, around the same time the park itself was established.
Walking up to it now, through pine forest and then holm oak, and finding the church roof, the old cloister, and the monks’ quarters still standing, is one of those moments that makes you stop talking for a minute.
The coast and Italy’s last cowboys
Past the abbey, the trail comes out at the old olive grove of Collelungo, still grazed by fallow deer and by Maremmana cattle — the pale, long-horned breed native to this stretch of coast. This is buttero country. The butteri are Tuscany’s traditional mounted cattle herders, working the same open land their families have worked for generations, and this is one of the last places in Italy where that kind of ranching still happens more or less as it always has.
From Collelungo, a short steep path drops to the beach below, regularly ranked among the most unspoiled in Italy — no umbrellas, no beach bars, just sand, dune grass, and the Uccellina hills behind you. If you have the legs for it, Cala Rossa is another three kilometers along the coast and worth the extra walk.
Getting there
The park sits a little over two hours from Rome by road, near the town of Alberese just south of Grosseto, where the visitor center issues trail permits and maps. There’s no train station inside the park itself — the nearest is in Grosseto, and from there you’d still need transport to reach Alberese and the trailheads. A private transfer solves all of that in one step: I pick you up in Rome or at Civitavecchia port and drop you right at the visitor center, then collect you again whenever your walk is done.
Combining Maremma with Saturnia
If a full day outdoors isn’t enough, the thermal pools at Saturnia are about an hour further inland, and the two make a natural overnight pairing — a morning hike through the park, an afternoon soaking in hot springs. It’s a slower, wilder alternative to the usual Tuscany itinerary of hill towns and wine estates, and I’d argue it shows you a side of the region most visitors never get to.
Planning your day
This isn’t one of our standard set-fare routes, so every Maremma day gets built around your pace, your interests, and how much walking you want to do. Message me on WhatsApp at +39 333 2831963 and I’ll put together a proper plan, or send your details through our booking page and I’ll follow up directly. For the rest of what this region has to offer, our Rome to Tuscany transfers guide covers everything from Chianti wineries to the thermal villages of the Val d’Orcia.
I’ve brought exactly two clients here in the past year, and both told me afterward it was the quietest, strangest, most memorable stop of their whole trip. I believe them.
— Edward