History - Riva degli Etruschi from the beginning

During the 50s the seacoast from San Vincenzo to Baratti was still a desolate piece of land abandoned to itself.

For centuries the territory between the road to Piombino, called "la Principessa" and the beach had been called the "forteto": a thick forest of Mediterranean maquis, an impenetrable underbrush and what remaind of the extended marshland of Rimigliano.
That's where now you see Riva degli Etruschi. Ferruccio Lazzi was actually stroken by the extraordinary fascination of this piece of land, so to buy it.
Having dedicated a lifetime to business he decided to transform its rough beauty to something absolutely unique in Italy those days.

The realisation of this so particular project was possible thanks to the experience Ferruccio Lazzi had in the USA with the "motels" built along the roads as refreshing halts and thanks to a patent for building rapidly small pre-fabricated lodgings.

The idea was to fit small lodgings into the marshy brushwood without changing the original and tipical Mediterranean maquis. These lodgings were ment to shelter tourists passing by or intentioned to spend a short period of time in this area.
This kind of enterprise had never been undertaken before in Italy and Ferruccio Lazzi won the bet: the results exceeded any expection and the reservations surpassed the offer even before the resort had been completed.
During land reclamation, the vegetation was preserved as much as possible, avoiding useless deforestation and forcing the lodging into the claimed spaces of land.

The different accomodations (hotel rooms, villas, residence) were distributed in harmony with vegetation and landscape and that is why the resort still is more or less invisibly from above, just a few roofs are breaking through the thick green park which remains indistinguishable from the Natural Reserve of Rimigliano right next to Riva degli Etruschi.

Walking along the small alleys inside the resort, you can feel the fascination of a quiet secular park and its forest trees that lead you to the splending beach of fine and golden sand.