Overview
A small church in the greenery at an altitude of more than six hundred metres for a village with a maximum of fifty inhabitants, and a primary school – which became too large for the number of inhabitants and was transformed at the end of the second millennium into a Historical Museum of the Resistance – are all that can be found by travelling up a dozen kilometres from Pietrasanta along a stretch of state road 439 and then up local roads.
The region of Stazzema has much more to visit: there is the Romanesque parish church of S. Maria Assunta with its Gothic and Renaissance capitals in Stazzema itself, and then the Madonna del Piastraio Sanctuary, the Waterfalls of Acquapendente, the Antro del Corchia which is the largest underground karst complex in Italy – over fifty kilometres of tunnels on slopes of more than a thousand metres, with an extraordinary display of stalactites – or the quarries of the community of Levigliani with mining archaeology in the Museo della Pietra Piegata.
Here in Sant'Anna, there's nothing of the sort: you find yourself on a different slope from the other destinations, and the road comes to an end. One only comes here to remember the more than five hundred civilians killed by occupying soldiers in 1944, the reason for the existence of the Parco Nazionale della Pace ("National Peace Park"), established in the year 2000 and still an intangible presence in the village.
